He would not get off the phone. I wondered why? This was not typical of Uncle T. I looked at the timestamp. We had been speaking for fifty minutes and he had been doing most of the talking.

First off, he called me late, past 10. His excuse which he tried to pass off as a joke was that he knew I was an owl and these were my witching hours.

“I knew you would still be up” he started with a chuckle and he reminded me of my early days in university, that season when I frequently squatted at his place, while he was still a bachelor. He would return from his partying and find me watching DVDs.

Twenty years had flown by quickly and in that time the gap between us had completely vanished. He spoke to me like an agemate. I was now a mother and his tone had even gotten more respectful.

“How is my grand daughter’s ear?” My daughter had just had an ear operation a week ago and I was surprised that he remembered because I didn’t recall telling him about it.

“She is good now, so glad we caught that in time”.

I had named my daughter after his mother, my grandmother and used her baptismal name. She was the first Felesia in two generations, a fact that seemed to make Uncle T very happy. Grandma died when he was still a child and he was raised by a foster mother. He had christened her “mama” and it was funny the first time he asked me, “Is my mama sleeping well?”

They had never met, not yet, though I sent him pictures practically every week and he had a whole series of funny memes that he used to express his pride and joy. Felesia had been born while he was recovering in hospital after suffering a stroke and somehow between Nairobi’s hectic schedules and mothering a new born, calendars had refused to align.

But this was the second time he was calling this week, just to chat.

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So I let him talk. He was jovial and I knew he wasn’t tipsy because he had been off alcohol since the stroke, six months ago. My aunt had traveled to the village and he stayed mostly at home, in Lang’ata, in the city with a caregiver, his movement limited for a man once about town.

I asked if he had any pictures of grandma as a young bride, with AI these days, we could enhance. That got him excited. He said he had one, somewhere in a photo album, the only one, of Dani taken with Babu just after they got married at the Ramogi Studios in Nairobi.

I liked stories of his Nairobi. He dropped names of places and people that had long ceased to exist. He had told me this story before but I didn’t stop him when he repeated it.

“I debated Taban Lo Liyong, the famous novelist from South Sudan, at Six-Eighty and Okot p’Bitek, The Okot! was so impressed he bought him rounds the whole night and started to teach him Achol”. That night, he said, three Luos, one from Kenya, the other from Uganda and another from South Sudan found kinship.

Those names still meant nothing to me even. I was never into his brand of African literature despite their literary legacies. He loved literature, African literature to be specific and now that he was mostly home bound, he had taken up reading again, which must explain why he had gotten so nostalgic about the good ol’days.

I excused myself briefly, when I had his ‘mother’ stirring in the cot and thinking he would hang up but he held the line and when I returned five minutes later, started an entirely new story about his student days in India. And he went off naming stars from the golden age of cricket. Sachin Tendulkar. Rahul Dravid. Souvrav Ganguly. Brian Lara. Curtly Ambrose. Maurice Odumbe. Steve Tikolo like they would mean anything to me. He always lost me when he started talking about sports because he was a bit of a historian and I felt he was really talking to himself, so I just listened without interrupting.

We spoke that night for another hour and it felt like a round up. From his adventures, sports, literature, family and about my daughter, and when he asked this strange question “Whose spirit had she inherited?” I didn’t know what to tell him. It was Felesia’s whimpering that finally got him off the phone and he told me,

“It is late now, mama needs you”. I promised to find him the following week to make concrete for the meeting and hang up, my ear warm from the call.

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Three days after this call, my cousin called in tears to break the news. Uncle T was gone.

I was shaking after the call and I let out a guttural scream that I cannot explain up to now where it came from. My husband, the poor man, didn’t know what to do with me. I was the strong one, now all broken and hysterical. That day, I kept going over the details of that last phone call. Did he know? All his words now seemed like coded messages that I had to decipher. That call was full of signposts. Was cricket a metaphor for living, endurance, patience, batting against the odds. He mentioned Taban Lo Liyong and the book that stirred the debate, Fixions. I had first read that book in his house in my post college years and only because he had insisted. Can’t even remember what it was about. Did I need to go back to it? His last words kept circulating in my head “mama needs you, mama needs you”.

He must have known his time was coming to an end and had called to say goodbye to his mother, or was this some kind of preparation to meet his mother on the other side. Why did he ask the question about spiritual inheritance? It was as if his spirit knew what his mind and body hadn’t comprehended.

I thought about how I had ignored his first call making a mental note to call him back and had forgotten until he called later that night. I remembered my impatience, the thoughts that had been running through my head on how to exit the conversation. The excuses I could have readily reached for that were genuine as a nursing mother. I am grateful that I didn’t do any of that foolishness. How would I have been able to live with myself? I just sat there, exhausted, just listening to him like a therapist. I was tired. Felesia had been restless the whole day but strangely through the call she only stirred once and went back to sleep.

When I told hubby about the details of Uncle T’s final call and expressed confusion, his reply was a bit too simple. “Maybe he called to say goodbye and tell his mother that he was coming home”. I wanted to argue because he had this habit of being dismissive and minimizing things but before I could, he said something that stopped the words about to emerge from my mouth, “You know, it is a good thing, you had the presence of mind to receive it”.

I played that sentence in my head for days. A good thing you had the presence of mind to receive it. He knew I was impatient and it had gotten worse ever since Felesia arrived, I was so easily triggered when I was exhausted. I wanted to believe it wasn’t his wisdom for I knew my hubby was ever skeptical when it came to anything spiritual. He didn’t talk like this and knowing this infuriated me further. I needed to make sense of these signs I had received.

I went back to our chat history. The pictures, the memes, the voice notes. He had consistently checked on me over six months since the birth of Felesia. How had I missed that detail? And I found a voice note, two months ago, in response to a video of Felesia laughing, “This one radiates. Mama through and through”.

I had not thought anything of this. I had filed it off as the kind of compliment you would expect from an lovable uncle but now, it hit different.

Did he know? Does the spirit override the mind and tell the body what to do? Is this how grief works, sprinkling signs so that we can make meaning of profound loss after the fact? Maybe hubby was right. There was nothing to be solved here.

So I stopped asking whether he knew but instead wondered whether I would have listened, had I known. And the truth is that not knowing is the only reason I stayed on that call for two hours without asking him to get to the point. The not-knowing is what allowed us to honour the moment with our presence.

“Mama needs you”. My baby needs me. His own mother wasn’t around long enough to watch him grow into an adult and bear her grandchildren.

He was telling me to be present. To be here. Now.

You may now purchase my book Strength and Sorrow here, at Nuria Store, at Text Book Centre branches in Nairobi, and across major bookshops in Kenya.

Strength and Sorrow by Oyunga Pala is now available for purchase on Amazon for the Kindle and Paperback HERE.

On Sunday morning I received an early call. I’d woken up fifteen minutes earlier, about to begin my morning exercise ritual, my sacred hour, no phones until I am done. But when the phone lit up and I saw my niece’s name, someone I had not spoken to in a long while, I just knew. She was composed, telling me without much preamble that my cousin Pip had died in the night and I was among the first they’d thought to call. I live outside the country, yet it fell on me to break the news to the wider family in Kenya.

Philip Owuor, the one we called Pip, was my first cousin. Our parents were siblings who’d followed each other in birth order. He was over a decade older, but he’d always treated me as a peer. That morning, when I reached my brother, our family’s informal archivist, he sent through a series of photographs: Pip, present at every funeral our family had held across two decades. It is, I’m certain, everyone’s story in our extended family, and in the church community he shepherded. Pip was a silent anchor in our seasons of grief.

Pip was the person you instantly thought to call when one of your own had departed. He was a clergyman and a hospital chaplain, a priest who sat at the bedsides of the terminally ill, preparing them for the final journey, helping families make sense of loss. He was even-keeled, understated. He didn’t pontificate, didn’t reach for poignant verses, didn’t perform care as was commonplace among many from his profession.

It is the kind of loss that hits you hard because I know how much ground he covered, and how exposed the family now is without him. He died days before I was due to give a workshop presentation of the importance of grief literacy in the workplace. Of the many lessons his life offers, that’s the one that has stayed with me the most.

Grief literacy, a term coined in 2020 by researcher Lauren Breen and colleagues, is “the capacity to access, process, and use knowledge regarding the experience of loss”. It’s built from knowledge, skill, and values, and treated as a collective capacity rather than a personal one. It’s a response to the modern habit in the West of outsourcing grief to professionals, a nudge back toward communities that know how to care for their own.

Pip was the most grief-literate person I’ve known. Naturally, I only recognize that in hindsight. He’d refined a capacity I’d been trained in since childhood without realizing it. That ability not to fix or resolve, but to sit still in the discomfort of sorrow without trying to rush toward closure.

What I now appreciate, through my own losses and years chronicling grief, is that I’m a product of a grief-literate society. I learned how to grieve from Pip, and from the family that raised us both. So I would like to share twenty lessons drawn from writings on grief literacy.

1. On Presence — My Friend, The Bishop

Do: Show up and walk alongside them through the dark and lonely nights of grief. Don’t: Reach for grand pronouncements or borrowed verses. Your presence does not require eloquence.

2. On Bearing Witness — Why Did They Die

Do: Witness their tears as active participation in their pain. Don’t: Treat witnessing as passive observation. Its power lies in being seen.

3. On the Right to Rage — When Sorrow Refuses Silence

Do: Trust unruly grief as a rational response to an irrational death. Don’t: Dismiss loud, disordered grief as excessive or undignified.

4. On Naming It — This Sadness Does Not Belong to You

Do: Name the grief and its true owner because it lightens what it can’t yet lift. Don’t: Let sadness sit unnamed and unclaimed.

5. On How to Actually Show Up — Men and Miscarriage

Do: Sit in the discomfort with them. Don’t: Minimize the loss, offer motivational encouragement, change the topic, or fall back on platitudes about “God’s will” or “God’s plan.”

6. On Grief as Lifelong Companion — The Two Widows

Do: Learn to carry loss because it starts the moment you’re born and never fully stops. Don’t: Expect grief to neatly end after a period of mourning, or expect the memories of the dead to simply leave because they are out of sight.

7. On Remembrance — Where Are Their Graves

Do: Understand graves as a language of love and legacy. Don’t: Mistake or dismiss the need to mark a life as mere sentimentality.

8. On What “Dying Well” Really Means — The Order of Good Death

Do: Define “dying well” as something beyond the pomp of the funeral itself. Don’t: Mistake the size of the send-off as the measure of a life lived.

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9. On Communal Grief — Of Harambees, WhatsApp and Compassion Fatigue

Do: Recognize WhatsApp fundraising funeral groups as real communal death-care and an act of love, even with all their imperfections. Don’t: Let the efficiency of a funeral fundraiser numb you to the harder questions it tends to replace. Why did they die like this in the first place, not just how will we bury them?

10. On Public Grief — Kenya’s Bereaved Generation

Do: Let public grief exist without waiting for permission especially when the majority deny its existence. Don’t: Demand grief to be quiet or orderly before it counts as legitimate.

11. On Urgency — Archive The Elder While They Still Breathe

Do: Record your elders. Ask them the hard questions now. Don’t: Wait until their last moments because the answers outlast you both only if you ask in time.

12. On Becoming Shelter — The Crisis of Eldership

Do: Learn to shelter others unconditionally. Don’t: Wait for recognition or an ideal moment to start. The best time to plant a tree was twenty years ago, the next best time is now.

13. On Facing Mortality — Isolation Ward 5C

Do: Show up for people you care about, even when you can’t bring yourself to admit how scared you are. Don’t: Mistake protecting someone from your fear of mortality for not needing them beside you.

14. On the Mask Slipping — I’m Good...so, I thought.

Do: Let grief surface when it needs to. Don’t: Mistake “I’m good” for “I’m healed.”

15. On Transformation, Not Erasure — The Alchemy of Grief

Do: Learn how to transform raw loss into something that can be held, examined, and passed on. Don’t: Try to suppress or erase grief outright with distractions.

16. On Grieving What Isn’t a Body — The Unseen Grief of Career Death

Do: Allow yourself to genuinely grieve a career, or an identity, that has ended. Don’t: Ignore that loss just because there’s no body to bury.

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17. On Outsourcing the Self — The Resignation Letter

Do: Make it your responsibility to keep your happiness and sense of self. Don’t: Outsource or mortgage your happiness to a job title.

18. On Displacement as Loss — The Baby Avocado

Do: Recognize displacement or migration itself as a form of loss. Don’t: Mistake being valued for your “exotic appeal” for belonging.

19. On the Unspoken Cold — Diaspora Grief

Do: Name the success-guilt and the weight of doing better than the people you left behind. Don’t: Let “people are dying crossing the Mediterranean to be in your position” become the reason you’re not allowed to grieve your own losses.

20. On the Ideal Child — The Special One

Do: Give them your unconditional love because it is the best gift you can offer as a parent Don’t: Spend years trying to fix the child to match a rhythm that was never going to be theirs.

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This is in memory of Reverend Philip Owuor (Pip)

“Well done, good and faithful servant” Matthew 25:23

With Pip during my sister’s funeral.

The text message arrived just a few minutes after noon. It was from Omosh.

Run to this home. I am stuck. Hold it for me.

There was a follow up message, a smiling picture of an older gentleman with a full head of grey hair and spectacles, his fair face dotted with dark freckles. Oredo did not know the area where Omosh said the funeral was taking place, though he wasn’t worried. He was sure his cousin Blanda, who owned a boda boda would know. Sure enough when he called Blanda for transport, he said he had actually dropped a caterer there that very morning for the vigil and the funeral would take place the next day.

On the bumpy ride to the home, he studied the picture as Blanda filled him in on the back story. The deceased was a former headmaster, well known pioneer educationalist. He didn’t come home often. Retired but lived mostly in Nairobi. The widow was from Uganda. Very beautiful.Three kids, an older daughter married to a mzungu who hadn’t arrived from America but the two sons had arrived with the body that morning. One was Ja Nairobi and the other one looked like he lived abroad because that hairstyle was like a musicians’. Oredo asked if they spoke Dholuo and Blanda said they didn’t look like the type that spoke it.

He asked Blanda to drop him outside the gate, where they found a harvested maize plot had been converted into a parking lot filled with cars and a few motorcycles. He scanned around, spotted two men standing under the shade of an Ober tree, hidden from the view of the main gate.

They were smoking. They were not from around here. These were definitely his sons and the resemblance was unmistakable. From their dress style and posture he could tell they were born-city. He guessed that the taller of the two young men must be the one living in Europe because of his hair. He had long dreadlocks tied in a band at the back of his head and Blanda was right. He looked like Ja Reggae and Oredo nicknamed him Rasta. The other one was definitely from Nairobi. He had a well nourished chubby frame, was wearing dark glasses and held two phones. They both greeted him warmly when he walked up to them and he started by offering a courtesy greeting in Kiswahili,

“Poleni kwa safari” and that seemed to surprise them to hear a stranger acknowledge the journey they had taken to get a body to the village for the burial, because they turned their full attention to him, both lowering their cigarettes to ensure the smoke did not drift in his direction. When the Rasta spoke, it was in fluent Dholuo that surprised Oredo. They definitely did not look like the type that knew Dholuo. Clearly they had not gotten lost and still understood our ways and that emboldened him to ask outright,

“Can I taste your cigarette?”

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The Rasta seemed puzzled but the chubbier one with two phones, took a quick drag of his stick and then handed Oredo his half smoked cigarette. Oredo took a greedy drag, his dry cracked lips hissing as he inhaled, savored it and blew it skyward in a stream and then after looking for the words in his head, he offered his verdict,

“This thing is smooth. You cannot even feel it in your throat. Not like the things we smoke in this village” and they both seemed to find his comment very funny and laughed.

The chubbier one with two phones beckoned his brother, who did not understand at first and after he flashed two fingers, he caught on and the Rasta extracted two white cigarette sticks with gold tips for Oredo who received them with both hands, clasping them and then tucking them carefully into his breast pocket. He thanked them and walked away towards the gate.

The gate was wide open and the main house occupied a central space in the large compound. On both sides of the house, they had erected white tents for the guests. There was a small crowd of newly arrived guests seated in the plastic chairs under the tent and some in the verandah of the main house who looked like VIPs and probably arrived in the two black 4 wheelers vehicles parked in the compound with drivers leaning on their bonnets.

Oredo adjusted the floppy hat on his head and took a deep breath and then let out a scream from the depths of his chest, that startled the two drivers who had been scrolling on their phones,

“Jowi! Jowi! Jowi!

And simultaneously flung his hat on the ground and with that dramatic opening he launched into his favourite dirge against death, the great robber,

Who would buy sugar for us now?

Who would teach us good table manners?

The people in the tent and the verandah took notice and some in the tent even stood up to observe him. A woman had her hand pressed flat against her chest, and her eyes of concern trailed him. He kept it up, half jogging, half walking, back and forth on the open lawn in front of the verandah, his hands clasped behind his head, lost in grief.

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“Jowi!Jowi!Jowi!”

When he finally stopped, after five minutes of commanding attention, he was out of breath. He noticed that two drivers and the people in the tent had turned into attentive spectators. He stood still now, his loud dirge reduced to a murmur twisting his head from side to side while staring at the ground, his fists curled and pressed onto his waist, looking very remorseful but also on the look out for the signal and sure enough it came. The woman who had pressed her hand on her chest when he started wailing sent someone towards him, and he had her instructions,

“Give the visitor some food.”

and a young lady arrived and ushered him to the back of the house, where he found a busy kitchen. The smoke was thick and the women with lesos tied around their waists worked with urgency.

He was shown to a chair with a stool in front of it and moments later the young woman returned with a plate heaped with rice, chapati, roasted potatoes, meat stew that had started dripping on the side of the plate. She told him to wait for a spoon and walked to an open dish rack and returned with one stating that they had already prayed for the food in the kitchen.

He knew it was quality food even before the first spoonful. They were a well off family. He couldn’t remember the last time he had eaten pilau this good at a funeral and it had spices, like something they would serve you in a restaurant in Mombasa. He ate slowly and no one bothered him but his eyes roamed trying to fill in the gaps in his story. These must have the beautiful wife’s relatives from Uganda Blanda mentioned. He had seen that fashion style before, the colourful long dresses that bunch up at the shoulders. They must be in charge of the food because this was not the usual standard. Omosh would regret missing this one.

When he finished, the same young lady returned to take his empty plate and offered him a glass of water. He stood up after emptying it and realised that he was stuffed and started looking forward to smoking the cigarettes that he could feel in his breast pocket that fortunately, had not gotten squashed during the vigorous activity of mourning.

He started walking towards the gate and the drivers were back to their original positions, leaning on the bonnets glued to their phones. When he got outside of it, he bumped into the two brothers returning from their smoke break.

The chubbier one asked him, “Have you eaten?” Oredo just tapped his belly to indicate that he was stuffed. The Rasta then asked if he was the one mourning earlier and Oredo nodded. The Rasta spoke in English of the nose,

“Thank you for doing this for Baba”, and then the chubbier as if waiting for the cue pressed a note into his hand. Oredo instinctively crunched it and without looking at it, slipped his hand into his pocket. Then clasping his hands together in gratitude he asked for a light and gently pulled one of the cigarettes he had been given earlier and the Rasta lit it up. They stood watching him as he took a long drag and declared again,

“This thing is smooth”

And both brothers laughed before the chubbier one asked,

“Will we see you tomorrow?”

Oredo replied, “ How can I miss? I’m just running to check on my cows”, and then as an after thought he asked, “What time does the service start?”

They told him. Ten o’clock sharp, the priest is very strict on time.

“Ten”, Oredo repeated, nodding, already walking away, “I won’t be late” and he walked away leaving a trail of cigarette smoke drifting after him.

You may now purchase my book Strength and Sorrow here, at Nuria Store, at Text Book Centre branches in Nairobi, and across major bookshops in Kenya.

Strength and Sorrow by Oyunga Pala is now available for purchase on Amazon for the Kindle and Paperback HERE.

Nandi swore she’d never return. The door of the airplane was flung open and the passengers filed out, many walking casually. The heat in Kisumu did that to you. It hits you square. Her suitcase was one of the first to arrive on the baggage belt, and she pulled it off and walked into a lobby jammed with taxi drivers, security guards, V.I.P drivers, and idlers. She wore a flowing kitenge, a tall headwrap, and big round dark glasses. She gave off that, just-leave-me-the F-alone, vibe. Nobody seemed to care.

“Sister, taxi!”

“Where are you going madam? I carry sanduk for you?”

“Auntie! Wait! Please! We have good car hire here!”

She keeps walking. She has a name on a phone screen and through the wide open doors to the parking lot, she spots a tall man waving a hand and holding up a phone. That’s her uber. She picks up pace. Then she hears them before she sees them and is walking towards them. They are staring at her and not hiding it. They talk loudly in Dholuo.

“Ma en:It’s her”

“Ok en:It is not”

“Ma en:It’s her”

“Ok, en anyisi,:It is not, I am telling you”

“Omera, ma en: My friend, it’s her”

She doesn’t turn her head or change her pace. The tall man meets her halfway across the tarmac and takes hold of her suitcase, matching her pace as he weaves between cars to his white Corolla. She gets in and is thankful for the AC and feels relief as the car pulls away. At the roundabout, they turn left towards Kisian, away from the city, to an Airbnb in Seme by the shores of lake, property of a diasporan who had built a hacienda in rural Kisumu.

She looked at the Riat hills on her right as the airport faded in the background and they had been peopled overnight. She adjusted her headwrap looking at the rearview mirror, glad that the driver wasn’t playing any music and he was not a talkative type and then he asked on cue,

“Is this your first time in Kisumu?”

“No!” and as if reading the room, he went quiet again. The road trip was fairly quick and there wasn’t much traffic on the highway. They turned off the main road onto a dusty murram road where a number of boda bodas were situated at a bus stop and drove past homesteads, until it appeared they had run out of road and arrived at a large imposing gate of a walled compound and when the gate was flung open, the driveway was paved with cabro blocks.

The house even looked more grand in reality than it did in the pictures. A bit out of place with its lush English gardens, swings, paved paths lined with flowers, two peacocks roaming on one side of the lawn and sprinklers spinning on the other, and the centre piece, a storeyed brickfaced building with arches everywhere and a courtyard with a long pool in the middle of it. She asked the caretaker why she couldn’t see the lake and he led up a wide stairway to the upper floor, through a bedroom that spilled onto a balcony that opened up into a vista. There it was, Nam Lolwe and the pristine blue spread out into infinity merging with the sky. This was the background of their first encounter, at a podcast that was named Nam Lolwe recorded in Kisumu in Dunga overlooking the lake, seven years ago.

Luanda wasn’t even her type. He was dark skinned and stocky, his round face borderline chubby and they were the same height. He wore his hair short, his moustache and beard trimmed to precision and he always dressed sharp. He was a guest on the podcast and she had come to close an advertisement deal. They met at the reception and she had no idea who he was and had never listened to his music. When he started talking, he was the complete opposite of what she had imagined. He was kind and patient and that’s how the affair started with a simple request.

“I am playing in Nairobi next Saturday at Greenspan mall, Doonholm. You must come”.

What she encountered was mind boggling. He was like a god in the Benga universe, loved by the fans, both men and women behaving like adolescents in his presence and once he held the mic, he was a wizard, casting a spell on his audience. So it was strange that he chose her, and nobody thought it was a good idea. Not her mother nor his wife. But Luanda claimed he was unhappy and persisted until her resistance broke and they got married as his second wife. It was a bad idea but she was young and naive and she thought she could change him and claim him to herself. Their most understated similarity was their stubbornness. Nobody told them what to do.They lasted two years. The most intense years of her life, ever. No children.

At first Kisumu hated her but then attitudes softened because the fans said she was the lucky muse and Luanda’s biggest hits were recorded in those two years. She was the one he came back to, his 1st lady whenever he was in Nairobi and the arrangement held. Nandi didn’t ask what Luanda did out there but when he walked through the doors of the house, she was the only Abebo of his life.

His death was strange. The morning was completely ordinary. The band manager had joined him for breakfast and they ran over the details of the festival as was custom before a performance. She fed him, ironed his outfit, wished him luck and was watching Netflix when the news arrived that he had collapsed mid performance and was getting rushed to hospital. He died in the ambulance at the gates of Nairobi hospital and they wheeled him straight to the morgue.

Her worst nightmare began that night, on a peaceful Friday night in September. She became the most hated woman in Kisumu. The one who killed a man everyone loved and would now inherit his wealth. Her own family had insisted that she shouldn’t go to the funeral and maybe, she should have listened to them.

They were fans rolling in the dust and even the men were ululating, the entire gathering inconsolable. A section of them wanted her ejected and heckled through her testimonial shouting “Janek: murderer” but Luanda’s mother stood her ground and asked the MC for the microphone and told off the hecklers. Her co-wife however, was stiff shouldered and mum, hardly making eye contact through it all even as they sat next to each other.

The crowd was pressing on the family from the back, people trying to all get a glimpse of the final lowering of the casket and when it came to her turn to throw soil into the grave, she hesitated, holding the dry coarse soil in the ball of her fist and started reciting a silent prayer with her eyes shut. It was at that moment that a stranger grabbed her hand from behind and shouted at her, “Dir loo! Fling the soil” followed by a chorus of “Orito ang’o: what is she waiting for” and before she could figure what was going on, she felt the sharp sting of a whip in the middle of her back. She turned around instantly and threw a handful of soil in the direction her assault came from and it landed on a choir member’s face and in the melee that ensued an innocent bystander was flung into the grave, landing flat on their back on top of the coffin with a thud that sent everyone silent. She had to be rushed out of the homestead for her own safety and she had not returned since. That afternoon she became known as the witch.

Five years pass quickly. Nandi thought she had left that life behind her. It was her elder sister who paid for her ticket to the Netherlands. She had been fifteen years settled there, divorced, the one who’d raised the younger siblings through school. She found herself in Ede, a small Dutch municipality in the middle of the country with no African community. Her sister put her to work, as an informal nanny to her nephew, off the books. She overstayed her visa and focused on caring for the boy. The child anchored her; his mundane, ordinary needs gave her structure and stopped her mind from returning to the trauma of her appended life. When the child started regular school, she was left with unstructured time and herself. The old ghosts returned.

The fallout with her sister had been a long time coming. She wanted her to remain small, work on getting her papers to start a new life in Europe. She got tired of the hiding and one evening after a motivational podcast binge on YouTube, she declared to herself, “the obstacle is the way” and told her sister of her plans to return home. Her sister was livid.

To do what? Then what? Are you out of your mind, after what those people did to you? How can you waste five years in Europe and leave without papers?

Hurtful words were exchanged and her sister issued an ultimatum. Nandi chose voluntary repatriation because she was fed up with wallowing in shame.The years of smallness and fear had brought her nothing and she was done with being afraid.

She spent a peaceful night in Seme and she woke up to a familiar feel of rural serenity. Cockerels crowing, cows bells clinking and the sound of the waves on the lake lapping gently against the shoreline papyrus reeds. She found the tall uber driver in his clean Corolla already parked in the compound. He was early. They made small talk and then began the drive to Nyang’oma near Muhoroni by the banks of the river Nyando to Luanda’s home. Nothing had changed here and the village was exactly as she remembered. The unremarkable flatness of this land strangely reminded her of the Veluwe in the Netherlands. Luanda had never built her a house and the homestead had three houses: the first wife’s, his brother’s and his mother’s. She was surprised to find a small group of women, standing in the long verandah of Luanda’s mother’s house silently watching as the car drove into the compound. They did not move from their position. But her mother in law greeted her from the distance by simply stating the obvious,

“NyaGot, iduogo limo osiepni? Daughter from the hills, you have returned to visit your friend?

A young man approached her, greeted her formally, and told her he would direct her to the grave site. It turned out that he was a nephew, a village relative who now worked as a guide because the grave site received regular visitors. She followed his lead through a grove of bananas to the grave that was now all built up. They had housed his grave in a white stone roofed mausoleum with benches on both sides of the tombstone marking the burial spot. It appeared it was visited regularly because the bunch of flowers on the grave had only started wilting. The young guide retreated and gave her a moment of privacy.

Nandi stood stiffly upright, reading the epitaph, stopping at “beloved husband” and felt numb until she sat on the bench and then her eyes started watering. She found she couldn’t move from that position and all the emotion she had suppressed for five years came rushing through, but nobody disturbed her. So she sat for a long time, trying more than once to get up but unable to, her eyes permanently wet.

It was her mother-in-law who came to fetch her alone. She walked in quietly, her frame sturdy for a 70 year old woman and sat beside her on the bench without saying a word and then moments after clasped her hand, squeezed it and said,

“NyaGot, koro oromo. Wadhi wachiem; This is enough. Let’s go and eat”,

and she stood up first and then Nandi followed her through the banana grove towards the main house.

You may now purchase my book Strength and Sorrow here, at Nuria Store, at Text Book Centre branches in Nairobi, and across major bookshops in Kenya.

Strength and Sorrow by Oyunga Pala is now available for purchase on Amazon for the Kindle and Paperback HERE.

There is an oral tale from my childhood: the story of Nyamgondho wuod Ombare. Of all the folktales I heard growing up, it’s one that stayed with me most. I can’t place exactly when I first heard it, but I still remember the illustrations from an oral literature class in primary school. Some stories stay with you, and only with age do we discover that the innocent folktales of our childhood were cautionary tales all along. I think of Hans Christian Andersen’s stories, the Emperor’s New Clothes, The Ugly Duckling, or Luanda Magere, the warrior who turned into a rock, simple tales that now read as sharp mirrors of character and behaviour in society. But back to Nyamgondho, son of Ombare.

This famous Luo folk legend tells the story of a destitute fisherman who lived in extreme poverty in Nyandhiwa village by the shores of Lake Victoria, in what is now present day Gwasi location, in Homa Bay county. He got by setting up traditional woven fish traps known locally as mgondho. The tale takes its name from this, Nyamgondho, means ‘the daughter of the fish trap’ in Dholuo.

The poor fisherman would lay his traps in the late evening and return in the morning to check for a catch. On this fateful morning, he stumbled on a strange encounter. Trapped in the fishing basket was a mysterious haggard and ugly old woman with a goat. This sight startled Nyamgondho and he was about to throw her back into the water but the old lady pleaded with him to take her home so that she would warm herself by a fire and in return she promised him great wealth on the one condition that he never revealed where he found her. He took her home out of the goodness of his heart and gave her something to eat and a place to sleep. By accepting the woman and the goat he accepted a debt. He treated the old woman with kindness and she in turn worked hard to build his wealth.

The son of Ombare’s life changed after this encounter and his wealth, then measured in massive herds of cattle, sheep, and goats filled his homestead. Overnight his status changed and he made the old woman his wife. Over the years Nyamgondho grew wealthy and married more wives. He started frequenting drinking dens and with every additional wife his pride grew. One evening, after drinking with his fellow male folk, they chided him about his ugly first wife and he returned home filled with anger. None of his wives who each had their own houses agreed to open their doors to him including the first wife and that left him livid and it was at her doorstep that he poured his anger.

“Even you, this ugly old thing that I dragged out of the lake, won’t open the door for me”. The lady of the lake upon hearing the harshness of his words asked whether those were truly his feelings and Nyamgondho raised his voice louder and asked her to leave because he could no longer stand her sight. The next morning she woke up at dawn and played tunes out of a wooden flute, while walking towards the lake shore. As soon as her feet touched the water, all the livestock in the homestead began to follow her and one by one disappeared under the surface of the water with her, never to be seen again.

Nyamgondho ran to the edge of the lake in distress, pleading for her return while trying to stop the animals from following the woman but it was all in vain. The tale ends with Nyamgondho so stricken with grief and regret that he froze and physically transformed into a tree that still stands in Gwassi today.

Nyamgondho was never a wealthy man but rather a custodian of her grace and when he broke the covenant, the grace receded back to source, leaving him as empty as the day he found her.

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I drew from this tale the apparent cultural lessons. Stay humble. Don’t let pride, arrogance and peer influence creep in and destroy a relationship. Moderate alcohol intake because it can lead man to foolishness. Husbands, respect your wives even when they become old and haggard. Don’t despise humble beginnings or withhold gratitude for the invisible hands that hold us up. Be kind to the poor and vulnerable and never betray trust that has been earned.

The folk legend has endured for these obvious lessons. It is easy to translate into modern day relationships because those vices are the currency of most marital disagreements. The couple that starts humble, builds together before pride afflicts one leading to contempt and an irreversible fall out. The humble partner whose labour is rendered invisible and their contribution goes unacknowledged until after the break off and then arrives the sinking realisation that the prosperity was an attribute of the discarded partner’s character.

I had never thought of this folklore as a story about grief that is entangled with such total shame, it makes it impossible to mourn in company. It struck me that there are some injustices so grave that there is simply no coming back from them. The Nyamgondho story is a tale of irreversible consequence. By committing the ultimate betrayal, he became the author of his own ruin.

The transgressors’ life is owned by shame and they lose their sense of personhood. They become like a shadow in the community, alive in the flesh, but seen as walking, dead. The repercussion is not direct punishment but a kind of disassociation. The community does not condemn him; they simply stop seeing him. He becomes a living cautionary tale, alive in flesh, but dead to the village. No one sits with him in his grief. His sorrow goes unacknowledged in the court of public opinion.

Nyamgondho is also a cautionary tale on unresolvable grief. There are some acts in society that constitute such total betrayal of values that they can only lead to the consequence of an irredeemable shame that sets upon one like leprosy. Though they still stand, they remain separated from all associations that gave life and in that state of loneliness, they wither without the benefit of mercy.

The community’s withdrawal, I now wonder, is less about righteousness and more a survival instinct. They watched the lake swallow and reclaim what it had lent. To sit with Nyamgondho in his grief would be to be tethered to a man, the lake itself, the source of life, had rejected. So they abandon him to his shame, not out of cruelty, but more like the quiet desperate logic of fishermen who have seen a boat sink and fear the under current.

One irony stands out. Nyamgondho was never his name. He was Mai, son of Ombare, until the woman from the lake entered his life, and Nyamgondho, daughter of the fish trap, was hers. He spent one drunken evening trying to degrade where she came from. For that, he lost the cattle, the wives, the wealth and in the end, his own name too. No one remembers him as Mai. The tale that survives him is told under her name. He denied her origin and became remembered by it instead.

You may now purchase my book Strength and Sorrow here, at Nuria Store, at Text Book Centre branches in Nairobi, and across major bookshops in Kenya.

Strength and Sorrow by Oyunga Pala is now available for purchase on Amazon for the Kindle and Paperback HERE.

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I dread summer. I don’t say this lightly. Summer is when the schools hand you back your children and the parenting burpees begin. For some of us, it is not a holiday.

I wasn’t thinking about any of this when I drove into the Amsterdamse Bos and parked the car. I had mapped this forest the way other men memorize Premier League football fixtures. It was the most visited location on my excursions with Maria, because the forest has no doorways. She could roam free here. In the summer they opened the public splash pools and in the blaze of a hot day, playing under a water fountain was every child’s delight.

The parking lot was full of vehicles. The bike parking spot had so many bicycles it looked like a grand scrapyard. How did people find their bicycles at the end of the day? The normally quiet forest was buzzing like a concert. I looked at my daughter in the back seat. She had already unbuckled herself.

This wasn’t the plan. The original plan was to ease the cabin fever with a circuitous drive through the forest, because drives were calming. We were going nowhere in particular. But I keep a bag packed in the boot every time we step out of the house: a change of clothes, swimming costume, lotion, bandages, plasters, paracetamol, a towel, wipes, a packed snack, fruit, cookies and juice all folded into a single backpack she has to carry herself. They say the weight gives a child a sense of safety. I have watched her scoot around without it just fine. What the weight actually does is slow her down. A backpack has a grip. A sprinting child does not.

In summer, everyone thinks alike, so all the public parks in Amsterdam are crowded. Nobody passes up a day of sun here. We ended up here because Maria recognised the route and started demanding Swimming! Splash! I’d brought her once before, three summers ago, when I was still naive and unprepared. There was a barbecue, Africans in the park, the annual ritual, families gathered with food, parents seated with a beer in one hand and a plate in the other, watching their kids clown around. I was on my feet for three hours straight. Somewhere in that first hour I understood that none of the other parents there had any idea what my afternoon actually was.

“Just let her play,” someone offered. There’s no answer to that sentence. My daughter doesn’t carry the borders other children carry inside them. Every ice cream cone in that park, as far as she was concerned, was hers. She was also a runner and the forest is full of inviting and unguarded waterways. In crowds this large, her sensory stimulation was heightened and a meltdown could be triggered at any moment.

I have learned since that there is a specific kind of loneliness in that sentence, just let her play. It assumes the only thing keeping me on my feet is anxiety. I looked like an inexperienced helicopter parent, with an only child seeing danger everywhere. Nobody in that park was withholding kindness. They simply had no reason to imagine that this normal looking child had a completely differently wired brain. There were no borders in her world. An ordinary situation could change in a heartbeat and it didn’t help that her speech wasn’t formed, so it would take a really discerning adult to realise that her sometimes erratic behaviour had nothing to do with being a brat or negligent parenting.

Maria had climbed through to the passenger seat. I decided we’d change here because I wasn’t chasing her into the kids’ pool fully clothed. I pulled the backpack from the boot, wrapped her in a towel, and we changed behind the open car door in the parking lot. I took her hand in a grip she was already testing. It was a short walk from the parking lot and the pool came into view. Packed. An oasis, minus the coconuts. I scanned for the toilets on the way in. There were two, gender-separated, nowhere near enough for a crowd this size. The bushes would have to do, if it came to that.

Maria was delighted, pulling against my grip. I let her go and watched her run straight for the fountain spray. For half a second I thought I should film it, then remembered you don’t do that here, not with other people’s children in frame. By the time I looked back, she’d already positioned her mouth at the exact angle to drink straight from the spray without straining her neck. How did she figure that out? I got to the edge just as she’d moved on, skipping through the water, delighted with something new.

I watched her, caught my own face doing something I didn’t like, and made myself stop. Regulate first, breathe in, stay in the moment. I still had the backpack on one shoulder. I took off my shoes and placed the bag down.

I had found a spot near the edge of the shallow pool between a three-generation Indian family with a canopy, folding chairs, a full badminton set, and a young couple roasting patties on a small camping stove, the buns already sliced open in anticipation. Both families had children too. Neither of them was watching the water the way I was.

I tried not to forget how far we had come. We were out in a crowded public place, and she was playing without me hovering a foot behind her like a body guard. There she was now, flat on her chest, repeatedly dipping her head in the shallow water and then lifting her head up and spouting water. I noticed a few children standing still watching her and in their faces I read confusion. Then off she went, and picked up a water gun that was floating about and started to examine it. A child appeared, obviously the owner but Maria was too absorbed in figuring out how it functioned. A parent appeared next to the child, I picked up the tension in her body and I waded into the pool and asked the lady if the gun belonged to the boy and she nodded, no words uttered, her lips pressed tightly. I apologised and asked Maria to give it back. She looked at me and dropped it back in the water where she had found it and scooted off. I picked it up and handed it to the woman who immediately moved away with her child like people evacuating a danger zone.

In the early days, these kinds of encounters were a source of embarrassment. I read all sorts of nuances in them. Racism, prejudice, judgement. Nowadays, it doesn’t bother me much. I don’t expect people to understand or see my situation clearly. They say, those who know cannot tell. I had stopped obsessing about her behaviour in public, wishing she could just do normal, because I realised that her normal wasn’t typical.

When we first received the diagnosis of neurodivergence, we did what all concerned parents default to, paying heed to every stitch of advice from the experts, who were sometimes young women out of college, checking a list and sharing the standard guidelines of how to parent a neurodivergent child. The child was seen through the lens of her symptoms and her challenges, and the educational system marked her special. Her pathway was predetermined.

We got drawn into a relentless schedule of therapy interventions: speech, occupational, behavioural, and waiting lists, hoping for the miracle of conversion.

I remember calling my mother then, the way you call home when you feel lost, expecting either shared panic or comfort, and getting neither. My mother heard the word neurodivergent the way you hear a word in a foreign language and waited for me to translate it into something she recognised and then said, “Nothing unusual, children are different” and then began a roll call members of the wider family who had been born different but turned quite okay in the end.

I tried to stress the frustration of parenting, without the support of the village taking shifts without being asked. The aunt who shared her name, who would have pitched a tent in our house because she had read exhaustion before we could admit it. A grandmother who would have composed a special praise song for the child and sang it every time she met her. Here, the village was a rotating cast of professionals who swore by questionnaires and billed by the hour.

Through the early years of schooling, during the parent-teacher meeting, I would typically listen as a teacher explained her developmental delays in comparison to her peers, listening to the long list of things required of her in a school environment that she couldn’t do and every time at the end of their submission, I would ask, “In your observation, is there anything you noticed that she was good at?” and all, without exception would reply with something vague and it was as plain as day that they never considered that question.

We watched the developmental markers go past, as her peers celebrated milestones, we were reduced to the language of delays and regression. We got used to the fact that our child would not be getting regular birthday invitations. Morning moods fluctuated like the Dutch weather and restful nights sleep were never guaranteed. Then somewhere amidst my obsessive research for solutions, I stumbled onto a small book by radical educator Caleb Gattegno and the title was Know Your Children As They Are.

It was a lightbulb moment.

A new journey began. We returned to the base of the mountain and started learning our child’s internal world, mapping her sensory triggers, her regulatory needs, her joy, her frustrations in granular detail.

I stopped focusing on the public judgement when a meltdown caught us in the supermarket, or when friends wondered why I had to leave the party early and alluded to my rigidity. I paid attention to my language, refusing to start every encounter with a disclaimer about my child’s anticipated behaviour, especially in spaces where the understanding was absent. In time, I started to avoid any place that was restrictive and that even included houses of people I counted as friends.

This is the nature of parenting in hard mode, where every outing requires a tactical plan and learning how to walk the thin line between a meltdown and pure naughtiness. Strangers could never understand the ingenuity of my adaptations, the high cost of experience or the moment-to-moment de-escalations I have to perform. All they see is a label - Autism, ADHD - and not the child thriving in spite of it.

It is difficult to explain that you can be joyous and frustrated at the same time. Who do you tell about the daily exhaustion and expense of parental labour without sounding like you are complaining about your child and inviting unsolicited advice from people who suggest that the fault lies in your family history? You worry about a future when you are gone and the hardships your child will face, the social rejection, bullying, misunderstanding, and the exhausting battle it will take for her to find a place in a world not built for her brain.

You come to a point when you accept that it is a commitment of a lifetime consumed by care and advocacy because the diagnosis is never going away. It is not one to be resolved and there is no miraculous healing on the horizon waiting as a reward to your devotion. This becomes the essence of acceptance, a cumulative experience of love that goes unrecognized.

So you carry the knowledge alone and that solitude is genuinely a loss of being witnessed as a parent. Yet that isn’t the tragedy. The true tragedy is the inability of the parent to recognise that their unconditional love is the biggest gift they could give to their child.

There’s a grief in there that I’ve never put a name to. It isn’t for anyone who died. It’s for the child I spent years quietly steering towards normal, correcting her rhythm to match a rhythm she was never going to have, before I understood that there was nothing wrong with the child but everything wrong with how I had chosen to see her, through the frame of public opinion and a diagnosis.

A child shrieking pulled my attention to the pool. It wasn’t my baby. Maria had dropped onto her haunches at the fountain’s base and started slapping the water, humming to a pattern only she could hear the music in. An older version of me would have called her back up and cautioned her to be careful. I watched instead, smiling. She had been in the water for over half an hour and there had been no incident.

The badminton game went on behind us. Somebody’s patties were catching, sweetly, on the little stove. The sun did what it does here in July, auditioning for a better climate. Maria did not look like she was ready to leave the water.

I could relax, so I lowered myself down on the grass, my eyes never leaving sight of her.

You may now purchase my book Strength and Sorrow here, at Nuria Store, at Text Book Centre branches in Nairobi, and across major bookshops in Kenya.

Strength and Sorrow by Oyunga Pala is now available for purchase on Amazon for the Kindle and Paperback HERE.

For the last three years I have sat with other people’s grief the way a doctor sits with other people’s bodies. I have written about all kinds of loss in my weekly substack column. I did not set out to become a chronicler of grief. I only wanted to survive my own grief by becoming an honest witness to my sorrow and turned to writing as a reflection tool to find meaning in loss. What I found, instead, was an education in what witnessing does for the people doing the surviving. I share here what I have actually seen and I hope it reaches someone who is going through a dark episode in their life, drowning while surrounded by a crowd who do not know how to bear witness.

1. Every house has tasted loss. There is an old story about a woman named Kisa Gotami who carries her dead child to the Buddha, begging him to bring the boy back. He tells her he will help, on one condition: bring him a mustard seed from any household that has never known death. She goes door to door, hopeful at first, and every single house has buried someone. She comes back empty-handed, and that emptiness is the whole teaching. My version of this story came after the loss of my father as a young teen. It was when my eyes truly opened to the universality of loss. I thought mine was the most painful and unjust until I looked around the room and realised it was just my number that came up.

2. It’s not about healing. When my sister died, I did not set out to build a project. I was fortunate to realise that suppression wasn’t working this time and I had to admit that I was suffocating in the aftermath. I thought the writing would close the wound. It didn’t. What it did instead was to take the rawest material of my life and, piece by piece, turning it into something someone else could actually hold in their hands and use. That’s the essence of the alchemy of grief project, moving from sorrow to strength and understanding that the goal is not the erasure of grief but the transformation of raw loss into something that can be held.

3. You mourn what mirrors you. My uncle Apollo died at twenty-five, a gymnast, who collapsed and died while exercising in a gym, and I was too young to remember meeting him. But I grew up with one black-and-white photo of him in tapered trousers and a huge Afro, pensive, not smiling, and I have carried that face for forty years like a private wound. Meanwhile a dormitory fire once killed sixteen schoolgirls in Kenya in a single night, and I felt the rage for about a week and then it passed through me like the weather. I am not proud of that asymmetry. But pretending grief is fair, that it distributes itself evenly according to the size of the tragedy, is a lie that will make you feel guilty for being human. Grief is not democratic.

4. Most people don’t know they’re swimming in grief until you name the water for them. There’s an old story, the one often credited to David Foster Wallace: two young fish are swimming along when an older fish passes by and says, “Morning, boys, how’s the water?” The two young fish swim for a while, and then one turns to the other and asks, “What the hell is water?” That is most of us, most of the time. We are so submerged in our own unnamed grief that we stop experiencing it as a distinct thing at all, we just think it’s the general temperature of being alive. Most of the reader feedback I have received is from someone telling me that my piece finally named a version of grief they had been swimming in for years without a word for it. Sometimes it is the stranger who gets to see and name the waters you are submerged in.

5. When someone is grieving in front of you, sit still in the discomfort. A man once showed me an ultrasound photo on his mantelpiece and told me it was his son, Myles, who would have turned six that year. I did not say sorry twice. I did not offer God’s plan or suggest that it was God’s will. I just stayed still, and eventually he said, “You’re the first person who didn’t feel a need to say anything.” He was an unseen father who survived three miscarriages and he felt seen for the first time in a long while. The silence was held open long enough for him to feel safe to open up.

6. Notice the people who are sheltering you before they are gone. A parent, an elder, a mentor, a friend, the person you go to when a problem needs holding. We often don’t register what they’ve been doing for us until the shelter is gone and the sky feels suddenly, unfamiliarly open. Ask them your hard questions now and do not wait until they are gone to give them their flowers. Say thank you, now.

7. Some losses will never resolve. My cousin Nick disappeared on the road to Tanzania decades ago and was never found. I remember asking his siblings, “Any news?” for a while, then stopping, because there was nothing kind left to ask. A Tunisian fisherman named Chamseddine Marzoug spent ten years pulling the bodies of drowned unidentified migrants from the sea near his village and giving unnamed strangers a grave when no one came looking. He was not trying to fix anything but instead honoring what could not be fixed because someone had to stop pretending the disappeared did not exist. True compassion begins exactly where the demand for closure ends.

8. Children can handle the truth better than our euphemisms. A five-year-old named Tanya kept asking her uncles where her grandmother had gone. “She’s resting.” “She’s gone to heaven.” Nothing landed, because none of it was true in the way a five-year-old needs to be true. Finally one uncle just said: “Tanya, your Dani died.” She went quiet, looked at the trees, and said, “I feel sad now,” and let herself be picked up. The truth, however hard, is something a child, or any of us, can actually stand on. The euphemism just leaves you circling.

9. To really witness someone’s tears is to do something, not nothing. A father named Meshack Ojwang stood in front of cameras after his only son was tortured and died in a police cell and simply wept, unfiltered, in public. Watching him, I understood something I’d half-learned from years of village funerals: hearing the story of how someone died, standing still for it, refusing to look away, is not passive spectating. To really see another person’s grief, not flinch from it, not rush them past it, is itself an act of care. It tells them the loss was real and it mattered. It is the one thing that stops a brutal death from being quietly filed away as normal.

10. When a death is unjust, let the grief be ugly. Do not perform composure you don’t feel. Four African women at a Gaza memorial in Amsterdam saw each other and simply broke down, wailing, “crying ugly”. I recognized that immediately, because I once stood in a hospital yard at seventeen, after staying up all night with a schoolmate who I believed was recovering, and when a nurse finally told me he had died of meningitis, I picked up wooden benches and threw them, desperate to break something because nothing made sense. They told me to calm down. I wasn’t being irrational. I was having the only rational response available to an irrational death.

11. Money sent from a distance is not nothing. But do not let a number replace a person. Every diaspora Kenyan I know has been added to a WhatsApp funeral fundraiser group without being asked, sometimes three at once. The group’s real currency turns out to be the amount typed next to your name. Someone wiring ten thousand shillings from Vienna gets publicly thanked and quietly ranked above the neighbor who sat with the widow every single evening until burial. I understand the guilt behind that transfer. Distance makes you want to compensate for the body, the tears, the presence you cannot give. But ten days after the funeral, the tents come down, the group goes quiet and gets archived, and the widow is often left alone in an empty compound with nobody checking on her, because the money only paid for an event. It is only after the event that the true weight of the loss descends and by that time, everyone has moved on, caught up in the busyness of life.

12. Suffering that has found a meaning is lighter to carry than suffering that hasn’t. While I was arranging a sudden family funeral in Uganda, an old friend named Felix Masi, who I hadn’t seen in over a decade, appeared and handed me a small, nondescript paperback: Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning. Frankl wrote it after surviving a concentration camp: suffering ceases to be suffering the moment it finds a meaning, even the meaning of sacrifice. You do not need the loss to make sense on its own terms. You need to find something it can stand for.

13. The relationship with the dead does not end. It just changes shape. My grandmother Wahonya used to call teenage me “my husband,” reminding me that the spirit I carried linked me to something older than my own single life. My own brother, who died in infancy long before I was born, has no headstone; his grave is only known because a giant Mama Mutere tree grew from that spot. John Mbiti gifted us the term “the living dead”: people who are gone in body but still fully present in memory, in names, in the trees that grow where they’re buried. We keep those who have gone before us alive by talking about them and holding them in memory.

14. Presence outperforms wisdom, every single time. When my sister died and I had to arrange a cremation, none of our usual pastors knew how to bless, one clergyman, Francis Omondi, made the calls, found no one else willing, and then simply came, at his own cost, by road and by air, all the way to Uganda. I don’t remember a word he preached. I remember that he came. If you don’t know what to say to someone in grief, come anyway. That is the whole lesson.

15. Cutting yourself off from grief cuts you off from your own people. A man I know built a New Year’s resolution around blocking every trace of mourning from his timeline, tired of funeral fundraiser requests and condolence posts. Within a week his feed was all influencers and positive vibes, and his actual friends had vanished from view, not because they’d left, but because every one of them was grieving something and his filter had quarantined all of it. Three hundred messages piled up in five days. You cannot filter out other people’s grief without filtering out the people.

16. Losing a career or a role you built your identity around is real grief. A man named Elijah sat awake at 2 a.m. trying to write a resignation letter after eleven years at a company that had just made his role redundant, cycling through rage, shame, disbelief, asking ChatGPT how to say a professional version of the words he actually wanted to use. His executive coach had asked him one honest question, what part he’d played in ending up there, and he couldn’t sit with it. That grief of career loss is as real as any funeral I’ve stood at. We just don’t give it a ritual, so people are left composing their pain into a polite paragraph at midnight, alone.

17. Grief that is refused a name does not vanish. It goes underground and comes back as something else. When a young TikToker named Brian Chira died in a hit-and-run in Nairobi, five thousand young people descended on his grandmother’s village for the burial. They arrived with alcohol and watered the flowers with it. They took selfies at the graveside. To the older generation watching, it read as disrespect. But it was the only funeral grammar this generation had ever been handed. Grief that a society refuses to recognize as legitimate doesn’t disappear, it goes underground and resurfaces later as spectacle, as numbness, or as rage with no clear target. Naming your own grief honestly, even without anyone’s official permission, is cheaper in the long run than paying for it later in a shape you no longer recognize.

18. You do not always get to choose your witnesses. Let the ones who show up in. A man turned forty alone in a small Dutch village and posted a lonely, half-joking birthday invitation on Facebook. Three strangers actually came: a South African, a Ugandan, a Kenyan neighbor he’d never met. Somewhere along a river walk, one of them asked how he was really doing, and he cried in front of all three, admitting it was his first birthday without his mother. They let him cry, then each poured a little of their own drink onto the ground in her memory. He had not chosen a single one of them. That was exactly why it worked.

19. Some people cannot say the true thing directly. Do not mistake that for not feeling it. On a train platform, a new father named Beno kept pressing an older father, Samora, for fatherhood advice, for the truth about how it changes you. Samora’s arms stayed folded, his answers stayed vague, “there is really no script,” “just don’t forget yourself, man,” until it slipped out that things were “not sunny at the ranch” at home. He never said the actual sentence. The silence and the deflection were the whole answer, if you knew how to listen for it.

20. A loved one’s wishes about their own death can be an act of mercy. My sister asked to be cremated, quickly, without fuss, and for years I carried that request as if it were transgressive. Then I watched a footballer named Allan Thigo make the identical request, and I finally understood what both of them were actually doing. They had watched what a long illness does to the people who love them, and their last coherent act was trying to spare us the extended weight of it. Sometimes the most loving thing a dying person can do is make it easier for everyone left standing.

I did not arrive at any of this by having answers first. I arrived at it by staying in rooms other people wanted to leave. The only qualification I have ever had for writing about grief, is that I stayed in the room long enough to actually see it. Grief is communal and requires a witness and most times, that is all people ask for, to be seen.

You may now purchase my book Strength and Sorrow here, at Nuria Store, at Text Book Centre branches in Nairobi, and across major bookshops in Kenya.

Strength and Sorrow by Oyunga Pala is now available for purchase on Amazon for the Kindle and Paperback HERE.

You would think, I know a lot about heat. I am a grown man, born and raised under the equator. I have been sun soaked and baked for decades. My skin tone is glistening melanin. I was born in Kisumu, during one of the hottest months where intense daytime temperatures beat down, and make the air thick with dust. This was my introduction to the world.

I have holidayed in Lodwar where it is blinding to look at the sky. The heat interrogates your marrow, cooking your thoughts until you start to ponder over existential questions. I have lived in Lamu, where I abandoned underwear and resigned to the aerated simplicity of a shuka and a vest. All through this, never thought to apply sun screen because common sense dictates that you stay under a green canopy until the heat passes. Heat was just something to be managed and it had its rhythms.

You would think, it holds that I have real lived experience of heat. After all, I am a genuine survivor of a near-death, heat-related event. The memory is still fresh though it happened decades ago. I had registered to run the full Lewa Safari marathon because, what is a marathon other than a very, very long jog. I had done all the pragmatic things. Jogged 5kms daily for about two weeks, abstained from sex, then the night before did carbo loading, just to make sure I had extra juice for the trail. On top of all this, I had acquired a military-issue tactical Camelbak hydration backpack with a delivery tube and bite valve, a flexible plastic hose that runs over the runner’s shoulder and clips to the front of the vest for effortless hydration on the go.

You would think that sounds well prepared. I thought it odd that the race organisers wanted us at the starting line by 6.45am and when they mentioned it was because of the heat, I didn’t panic. The first 5k was great by any measure, steady cadence, upright posture. I was way ahead of the herd and had the elites in my line of sight for at least a kilometre. Then the engine started overheating. The hydration therapy did not produce the anticipated results. The camelbak soon felt like an actual camel on my back. Somewhere around the 7k mark, the gasket blew and I was reportedly spotted on the side of the trail chugging the water. The rational thought process had slipped away at this point and I only had one thought in my mind, I have to survive. So I carried on as the entire herd ran past me, even the walkers came and went, each with a similar look of concern and the recurring query,

“Are you okay mate!”

It was the ego that stopped me from laying on the ground and waiting for the rescue chopper, because after all the old ladies trotted past, I knew I wouldn’t survive the roasting that awaited me at the end of this race if I quit. I imagined in my head that I was maintaining an easy jog pace but witnesses described a big man slugging through the dust, perpendicular to the ground. I should point out the Lewa marathon circuit is a double loop of 21kms. Since God is good, all the time, I made it to the end of the first 21k and got into a fight when the race marshals insisted that was not the end of the 42k. It was the proverbial last kick of a dying horse that fortunately, missed its target, resulting in a rather undignified collapse. But I had made my case. I was not going back to hell.

You would think that must have been a turning point. Indeed, to some degree it was, I moved on to a relatively modest stint as a one-acre farmer in the blazing hot Siaya sun. I had learned to respect the sun and followed the lead of the veterans. That meant getting to the farm before sunrise, so that it would find you after the momentum was gained and out at its peak at 1pm. That was the rhythm. With those incredible weather credentials, I ventured North, with only one fear on my mind: winter.

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My introduction to European weather as a child came through Santa Claus, who operated amidst the cold and darkness. I would learn that comfort indoors in winter was a privilege. Heating is costly and the natives here have learned to tolerate the cold. My first summers in Europe were cold and wet, I thought no wonder the Dutchies all abandon their country in the warmest months of the year. I remember it rained straight for two weeks in July and by the time autumn arrived I was punctuating every conversation with a weather forecast. The chill seemed to follow me everywhere, from the outdoors and into my bed. One Kenyan veteran aptly described it as, whether you like it or not, weather.

But I survived northern European winters and resisted the urge to return to paradise. The cold in the Netherlands has thrown everything at me but I am no longer fazed. I was one of the calmer residents when a snow storm and high winds came in February and triggered a code yellow warning. There was countrywide travel chaos and Schiphol international airport cancelled over 60 percent of its scheduled flights. It was a third-world level, open-air market ruckus. The government, faced with a criticism of unpreparedness for this weather event, said it would pass. Not worth changing infrastructure for a few days of heavy snow. We are not Norway.

You would think, what else is there to worry about after this. Summer must be a breeze, given my tropical pedigree. Just last month, the Netherlands issued a code red warning. There was a heat wave melting everything on its path through Europe and it was now the Netherlands’ time to fry.

The phone buzzed in the early morning with an emergency alert. Code red. I had never received a warning this formal about warm weather and by my estimate, it was just going to be the equivalent of a stifling hot day in Kisumu, in January. I checked the app with the trepidation of a man checking his bank balance the morning after a wild night. Thirty six degrees Celsius, the little sun icon was stretched across the day and it said it would feel like thirty eight.

By midday, I had checked it over ten times. I know this because my wife pointed it out as she asked me what my coping strategy was. Back home a grown man does not consult an app if he should go outside. He reads the sky and makes a decision. Here, I was refreshing my weather app like a party agent waiting for the final vote tally. Public transport was disrupted and I heard rumours of infrastructure malfunctioning.

At 2pm it hit thirty five, one degree short of the app’s own prophesy and when I went on social media, my feed was jammed with apocalyptic messages; stay indoors, avoid strenuous activity, hydrate and all sorts of cooling hacks from novices showing signs of early stage heat hallucination. Those bastards got to me. I sat down in panic.

I had watched the street do it for two days before I attempted it myself. Every house in the neighborhood had its curtains drawn by seven in the morning, and at first I couldn’t make sense of this native custom in a country known for its open windows and no curtain policy. I asked a local, an academic, about this strange custom thinking someone important had died and was this the Dutch version of flying the flag at half-mast. She explained. It is to keep the heat out. Whatever you do, do not let the sunlight in. The house will trap the heat. Open the windows at dusk when the outside temperatures are lower than the interior temperatures.

I felt like a fool. We had kept our windows open and kept wondering why the house was stuffed with thick, unmoving air, possessing rooms like an evil spirit. The house was warm enough to bake bread and I had recurring thoughts about buying a boat.

By the next morning I had become a full convert and militant in execution, like a bouncer deciding who gets past the rope. Curtains were drawn at seven, blinds down and the house kept in a state of daytime darkness more suited to a vampire, monitoring the app and waiting for the outside temperatures to drop low enough to allow cool air in. I caught myself, sometime in the afternoon, explaining this system to a Kenyan friend with the stuffy authority of a man who held a patent to this invention. My wife overheard me and asked why I hadn’t done this from day one and I told her some lessons are worth the sweat.

I had purchased two portable fans and they were frankly just a placebo gimmick for the kids. I made another call to the local, the academic, about the minimal use of air conditioning and ended up on the receiving end of a lecture on environmental responsibility and common sense. The summers are mild, it only lasts a few days, she said as I stared at the thirty six degree reading on my app.

After this call, I went to the local supermarket for ice, because my stock had run out. I was too late. What remained in the cold section was a single devastated shelf of ice cream. Outside the supermarket I found a queue of elderly people waiting patiently to buy ice cream cones. My eyes settled on this man, who had the rugged sturdiness of a World War Two veteran, slurping up his ice cream cone with glee on his face. I began to suspect that this love of ice cream was not really about the heat. It appeared to me as a license to indulge in a scoop of childhood joy, to return to a time when all you needed to endure the heat was a dip in the canal and an ice cream cone.

I needed to get back to the house before my own box melted but stopped to watch a group of giddy boys jumping into a canal that I have never seen anyone swim in, with no ceremony or negotiation with whatever lived down there. Where I come from you do not enter a water body on a whim. It is strongly advised to approach any water body with appropriate respect for whatever unnamed thing might be renting the bottom of it.

By the third night, I understood that the memory of heat I had been carrying was different. The European summer sun and the tropical sun are not the same creature. The heat here did not dial down after 4pm. The thermostat read thirty at midnight, the same number it had read at two in the afternoon, and my wife and I sat facing a single fan and not enjoying each other’s company as we hydrated with whatever cold sugary drink could deliver the placebo effect we needed to get through the night. Summer nights can be as brutal as the days and come with restlessness that makes a mosquito menace pale in comparison. At least with mosquitos you can duck under a net.

At the internationals barbeque in the park that weekend, trading survival stories, the whinging was dialed up. A Zimbabwean mate described his flat as a kiln, another raised theirs to a sauna and someone bragged about sleeping in a tent in their backyard. I offered my own thermostat reading and was met with nods of approval. Weather whinging was not really about the weather. It was a cultural integration test, and I had proven fluency.

I felt a strange sense of camaraderie on my way home. We had survived something together, even something as small as a ridiculously warm week. The neighbourhood streets were empty in the way they get after 10pm here. The sun was still up, this time pleasant but nobody was outside to enjoy it. What nobody at that barbeque mentioned was that this was, in fact, going to be the norm.

Something had shifted and it wasn’t for the better. For most of the year, this sun behaved like a torch held at arm’s length, all light but no heat, and then for two or three weeks, it drops the act and comes at you like it has a grudge to settle. Back home we had a name and shape for this kind of behaviour, El Nino, a weather event that misbehaves and is expected to. Here it came with the benign term, heatwave, while a more appropriate term would be Sahara is coming!

The thought lingered in my mind. A heatwave that recurs is not just freak weather anymore, it is a forecast of the world my daughter will grow up in. My daughter asked me, on the worst of the three nights, why I kept telling her to sit still and not kid around and I opened my mouth to repeat my imported tropical wisdom, and stopped before I uttered a word. She was looking at me the way she does when she suspects the answer was going to be vague but she waited anyway.

I had a whole inheritance of heat wisdom and none of it had a translation for children who are not bilingual in climate. How could I teach her about heat fluency and to move through the heat without carrying its assault on her skin when she had seen me succumb to panic and take refuge in ice cream? I ended up telling her to obey her parents, as the bible instructs, and to sit still in front of the fan, then bought her compliance with another rainbow ice lolly.

I now keep the freezer stocked, the way you’d keep a fire extinguisher, for an emergency. My daughter thinks this is just what her father does in summer, dispensing ice cream like a drug dealer. I haven’t confessed to her that I am waving a white flag. Some inheritances skip a generation. This heat, I suspect, is just getting started, and I’m still learning the language I’m meant to be teaching her.

You may now purchase my book Strength and Sorrow HERE and across major bookshops in Nairobi.

Strength and Sorrow by Oyunga Pala is now available for purchase on Amazon for the Kindle and Paperback HERE.

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“Hi, my name is Chira, Brian Chira, and I saw the whole accident.”

That was 2022. A roadside accident in Kenya. A crowd of witnesses has gathered in front of a female reporter’s microphone, and as she adjusts her earphones to start the live broadcast, a young man in a frumpy, white T-shirt steps forward, naming himself before anyone asks, articulate and composed at a scene of death. Nobody in that crowd knew his name yet. Two years later, the whole country would.

Here was a young man sharing an account of a grisly road accident, articulate in his recounting and confident in his manner. His name would find me again in March 2024, following his own tragic death after a hit-and-run incident at 3 a.m. on March 16. A news report said Chira had been ejected from a club in Gacharage, took a boda boda, and when the rider took the wrong side of the road, Chira alighted. He ran towards the main road and was struck by a white Canter vehicle that did not stop. The autopsy revealed that he died of multiple organ injuries and blunt force trauma.

He was only 23 years old at the time of his death.

It was the outpouring that stopped me, the sheer viral volume of it, and got me reflecting on who he was and why the circumstances of his life connected with so many of his peers who came to celebrate him at his funeral.

The build-up to his funeral lit up social media before a single wreath had been ordered. The Chira Clan crowdfunded the burial and raised over eight million Kenyan shillings in days. On the 26th of March 2024, over five thousand young people descended on Gathanje village in Githunguri in rural Kiambu and overran it.

The village was overwhelmed. Some mourners arrived with alcohol and watered the bouquets with it. They took selfies at the graveside. It mimicked a mass content creators’ gathering. They performed because performance was the only grief language available to them. To locals and observers, it read as disrespect, but to the Chira Clan, it was the only funeral they knew how to hold. This was a generation attempting to mourn without having inherited the tools for mourning.

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Grief expert Kenneth Doka calls it disenfranchised grief. This is grief that society fails to recognize as legitimate, that receives no ritual, no validation, no communal architecture for release. When the recognition is withheld long enough, grief does not disappear. It goes underground and resurfaces as performance, as spectacle, as young people watering flowers with alcohol because nobody taught them the older grammar of sorrow.

Brian Chira’s grandmother, Esther Njeri, had one request. She buried Brian in a graduation gown that in life, he never got to wear because he dropped out of university for lack of fees. She dressed him in the future that was taken from him. The mainstream press arrived and reported on the alcohol, the selfies, the sexuality of the deceased, and the chaos. The press corps covered the spectacle and forgot about the grief that compelled five thousand people to come to a village in Kiambu to bury someone most of their parents had never heard of.

You may now purchase my book Strength and Sorrow HERE.

Brian Chira’s back story, before TikTok made him famous, is one of layered loss. His fame came from his charisma, relatability and honesty. He personified the frustrations and setbacks of his generation, and he had the ability to share his pain with unflinching honesty. Chira was orphaned at eight, both his parents taken by HIV/AIDS, a disease that moved through two decades of Kenyan life and left a generation of orphans around the country in the care of grandmothers. He came under the care of his grandmother, living in Githunguri, Kiambu. Chira would later contract HIV himself, after being sexually assaulted by a friend at a party in Mombasa. He had blacked out. The friend who betrayed his trust later took his own life. Chira wasn’t afraid to speak of any of this. He turned his pain into content.

This is the singular trait of Chira’s generation. They do not suffer in silence. They name what is hurting them. They take the trouble to identify what is not normal.

In Chira’s story, we find a symbol of a bereaved generation that arrived on the scene already carrying unprocessed loss, passed along like a tin can kicked down the road, from one generation to the next, until it joins a pile of uncollected garbage by the roadside that keeps growing until those who live around it stop smelling its stench or noticing its abnormality.

Brian Chira and his generation are the kids who shout that the king is naked. The public reaction is to call them disrespectful for drawing attention to something everyone else has trained themselves to not see. His story is where the inherited traumas of a generation become visible.

The original sin of this country was the war of independence that arrived as a negotiated settlement, the betrayal leaving the freedom fighters, the Mau Mau, the youth of that generation, unburied and erased. There is no clearer example than Field Marshal Dedan Kimathi, who was executed by the British on the 18th of February 1957 and buried in an unmarked grave within the grounds of Kamiti Maximum Security Prison. His widow Mukami spent the next 66 years asking one question: Where is my husband’s body? She survived Kenyatta, Moi, Kibaki, Uhuru, and Ruto. In 1990, Nelson Mandela, five months out of prison, came to Kenya and asked to see Kimathi’s grave and to meet his widow. He left having done neither. Neither the grave nor the widow could be produced. Mandela finally met Mukami in 2005, only after Mau Mau had been quietly decriminalized. Mukami died in May 2023, aged 96, still not knowing where her husband lay. Though his statue now stands on a street named after him in the centre of Nairobi, his grave remains unknown.

Cameroonian historian Achille Mbembe teaches us that sovereignty is not only the power to govern the living. It is also the power to decide whose death matters, whose body deserves a location, and whose grief is permitted. The Kenyan state answered that question in 1957 and has been defending that answer ever since. The dispossessed remained landless. The land clashes that followed across generations were the unresolved argument returning in violence. And the template was set. Name the crime. Honour the martyr. Bury justice in an unmarked grave.

JM Kariuki was murdered in 1975 for imagining a different Kenya that was not defined as a country of ten millionaires and ten million beggars. A parliamentary committee named the killers, and yet nothing happened. That sequence, the naming of the crime, and the inaction that follows became the template for Kenya going forward. The public came to terms with a state that is under no obligation to keep its promises because there was really no consequence for breaking them. Unlike Dedan Kimathi or Tom Mboya, whose statue stands on Moi Avenue in Nairobi, twenty metres from where he was assassinated in 1969, JM Kariuki has neither a street named after him nor a monument. JM’s demand for economic redistribution remains a live indictment of every government since.

The AIDS crisis of the 1980s and 1990s did not just take lives. It decimated a generation and with it the ritual holders. The elders, the mid-generation, the very people who knew how to conduct a burial, how to hold a family through loss, and how to give grief a communal shape. The cultural tools for processing grief were overwhelmed at the precise moment that loss became overwhelming. The Structural Adjustment Programmes of the 1990s removed the guard rails simultaneously. Public health facilities became dysfunctional. Cost-sharing rendered dedicated healthcare a matter of privilege. Burial became logistical rather than ceremonial. It was like a time of war, but characteristically slow and unacknowledged. A violence that had no single author and therefore no one to hold accountable. Families mourned their dead in helpless silence. Like COVID, which arrived decades later to repeat the lesson, societies discovered they had never built the infrastructure for collective grief. What remained in place was only for collective forgetting.

Swiss-American psychologist Pauline Boss developed the concept of ambiguous loss to describe what happens when grief has no resolution. What happens when there is no body to bury, no verdict to receive, no moment at which mourning is permitted to close. Boss developed the framework for families: the soldier missing in action, the parent lost to dementia, the child taken, leaving no trace.

But what happens when the family is an entire nation? What happens when the unresolved losses are not one family’s private wound but a country’s accumulated, unacknowledged, and unaccepted grief, passed down through silence, and through the bodies of children who grew up in houses where certain names were never spoken, and certain dates arrived each year without ceremony?

Kenya is that nation.

The land clashes of 1992 were state-sponsored ethnic violence that swept through the Rift Valley and the Coast, leaving between 1,500 and 3,000 dead according to some accounts, and hundreds of thousands displaced, many of whom remain displaced to this day. Kenyan author Kinyanjui Kombani documented what the statistics could not hold in his novel The Last Villains of Molo. Kombani writes about five young men brought together by the Molo clashes of 1992, forging a friendship that crossed the ethnic lines along which people around them were killing each other. The children of the violence built solidarity from its rubble. Nothing happened to the perpetrators.

The cycle repeated in 1997. The state revived the same script, enacted it with the same impunity, and confirmed what 1992 had already suggested, that there would be no consequences. Something changed in the fabric of Kenya, at least for my generation that came of age during this time. The fiction of a nation dropped, and the realization settled that political stakes could turn your neighbour into a raging arsonist and that there was no place to run to for justice. Ignorance was no longer a defence. This is where the silence was born of people who knew exactly what had happened and had learned that knowing changed nothing.

Even after President Moi vacated power in 2002, the respite was brief. The ghosts had not been exorcised. When the 2007 post-election violence erupted, it was those unhealed wounds that were torn open again. Over 1,300 dead, hundreds of thousands displaced, and then followed the familiar sequence: the quest for justice that led to the ICC proceedings in The Hague, with the promise that this time would be different. The men whose hands carried blood would marshal support on a sovereignty platform and capture political office, and the cases collapsed soon after as the silences returned.

The grief of 2007 joined the long list of unresolved losses converted into political currency. Accept and move on became the national slogan. We were witnessing disenfranchised grief at a national scale because what happens to a person when you realize that the boot on your neck belongs to the hand that feeds you? When the people mourning loudest at the funeral are the sponsors of the crimes, silence becomes the only available adjustment to absurdity.

Over these decades, the crucial ritual architecture of mourning was dismantled, layer by layer, crisis after crisis. By the time Brian Chira was buried in March 2024, there was nothing left to hold the weight of what five thousand young people brought to that graveside in Githunguri.

Three months later, in June, the streets of Nairobi erupted.

Before they masked up and took to the streets, many wrote their own obituaries and posted them to their social media timelines, instructing followers to notify their families and organize their burials if the police killed them. A generation that had studied Kenya’s pattern long enough to know that they might become its next unseen entry chose to go anyway.

Over sixty young people were killed in the state’s suppression of the Finance Bill protests. The sequence held. Mass loss of lives. Named perpetrators. No accountability. And then, as before, the grief was converted into political currency. The 2007 post-election violence produced a government of national unity. The 2024 protests produced a broad-based government. Different eras, but the same transaction, the dead paying the political bill, the living expected to accept the change and move on. After every election cycle, grief is left unattended or left raw by design because of the political potential it holds to prevent reckoning and to be banked whenever convenience demands.

But the transaction failed this time. The conversion mechanism had broken down. The political class that normally captures grief and weaponizes it into ethnic arithmetic had already performed that trick in 2007-8, and this generation had watched the whole sequence in real time. The trick had been performed too recently and too visibly. A generation that grew up watching grief converted into power and position could not be made to hand their grief over for the same purpose again.

Therefore, what can a generation do with grief it cannot name? Brian Chira turned his story of grief and survival into content and his pain into entertainment. Social media became a stage available to a young man without ritual architecture, without elders to guide him through loss, or a political channel willing to take his grief seriously. It was the last public stage, where he could share his testimony to an audience that recognized what he was carrying because they were carrying the same thing.

This is what the generation that we labelled Gen Z is doing all along. The social feed has become a mourning ground because every other mourning ground was inaccessible, and the public spaces policed. A generation with nowhere to grieve did what humans have always done when the recognized channels close. They found another way.

Brian Chira’s burial and the June 2024 protests were not separate phenomena. They were the same grief on different stages, both leaderless, both excessive by the standards of those who had learned to grieve in silence. Both generated a collective outpouring that far exceeded the immediate occasion, because the immediate occasion was never really the point. The point was everything buried underneath it.

This is what public grief looks like when it stops waiting for legitimacy. What June 2024 revealed was not a protest that burnt bright and faded. It was a grief ritual. The streets became a mourning ground, and for a moment, the grief stopped waiting for permission.

Two years later, the question is not what the generation achieved. Grief rituals are not measured in political outcomes. What matters is what was finally named; the sixty years of accumulated loss, spoken aloud in public, without being immediately converted into someone else’s political currency. Whether that naming becomes closure is a question this anniversary cannot answer. The wound is older than the generation carrying it. And the older the wound, the longer the vigil.

What remains is Esther Njeri, Brian Chira’s grandmother, alone at the headstone, tending the grave. The Chira clan has moved back to the feed. The five thousand are elsewhere. But Njeri remains, doing what her generation knew how to do, and the New Native is still learning on their own terms, what she already knows.

This article was first published at The Elephant

https://www.theelephant.info/analysis/2026/06/30/kenyas-bereaved-generation-and-the-birth-of-a-new-native/

Strength and Sorrow by Oyunga Pala is now available for purchase on Amazon for the Kindle and Paperback HERE.

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Grief operates asymmetrically. A recent death reaches back and pulls up older ones, and what you find when it does is not always what you expected to feel. A couple of weeks ago I wrote about the passing of an eminent Kenyan scientist Prof Shem Oyoo Wandiga, laid to rest on 12th of June.

The grief of that loss pulled up another- Prof Fredrick Moses Okatcha, who died on December 24th, 2021. Both were distinguished scholars who spent many evenings in conversation at United Kenya Club in Nairobi, where I made their acquaintance. Two elderly men of the same generation, men of intellectual depth and men at ease with an unhurried way of occupying a room. Both are now gone within five years of each other. I did not fully understand what they were to me until they were no longer here. Both became father figures, quietly, before I had the language for what they were doing. This matters more than it might otherwise appear for a young man who lost his own father as a teenager.

Prof Okatcha in particular took me in without ceremony. I earned a place in his weekly routines as a dedicated chauffeur. We logged many hours that way, with him in the passenger seat, me driving and allowing the conversation to go wherever it needed to go.

Prof Okatcha was born in 1938 in rural western Kenya. In 1959-60 he was one of the students selected to study through the American student airlift programme organised by Tom Mboya. While a student in the United States he had the honour of meeting Malcolm X, President Harry Truman, Senator Paul Tsongas at Yale, and George Romney, former Governor of Michigan State. Prof Okatcha attended the University of Central Missouri, Yale University, Michigan State University and returned to serve his country eventually rising to the ranks of Professor and Director of Educational Psychology, Kenyatta University, Nairobi. During his tenure as an academician at Kenyatta University, he was also the Dean of Faculty of Education, Director of Continuing Education and International Programs.

Okatcha was also a peer of Barack Obama Snr and when Barack Obama became the first Black president of the United States, I had the privilege of arranging for an interview about his memories of Barack Obama’s father for the Adam magazine where I served as editor.

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What always surprises me when I come across these kinds of reflections is how prophetic they appear and how truth remains unaffected by the passage of time. What follows are his words, captured in 2014 for Wisdom of The Elders, a coffee table archive of personal reflections from over seventy kenyans who have lived through changing times, conceived by Susan Wakhungu-Githuku of Footprints Press and photographed by Bobby Pall. I came across my copy during a recent house clean and sat with it longer than I intended. What stopped me was how little his words had aged. A man speaking in 2014 about tribalism, compromised democracy, and a generation shaped by poverty reads in 2026 like someone who already saw what was coming and said so plainly. This is what genuine wisdom does. It stays unaffected by age.

While not all elders are created equal, there is no shortage of wisdom for the keen student of life. This is an appeal to my generation and to others to find the value of capturing the wisdom of their elderly seniors while they are still alive, for the insight of their lived experience is invaluable.

I urge you to read him slowly.

How would you describe yourself?

A well-educated, hard-working, successful academician who is internationally recognised.

How would you describe your childhood?

I was raised in oblivion, full of malnutrition and diseases.

How did your parents earn a living?

My parents were poor peasants with no formal education. They earned nothing.

What were some of the important events that were happening during your childhood?

Missionaries were providing education and spreading Christianity. We also heard about Mau Mau, Dini ya Msambwa (a political religious movement), World War II, and circumcision ceremonies.

How do you feel about these events?

Education and Christianity were stimuli for modernisation, but I do not know the contribution the other events made toward the modernisation of Kenya. They were turbulent times characterised by unrest from the citizenry. The yoke of colonisation had taken its toll and people were agitated.

What do you think about life today?

Life today is hectic and full of pressure and tensions, and devoid of kinship ties — a price for modernisation. Gone are the days when a young boy could chase and catch wild rabbits which were found all over in rural areas or ‘reserves’ as they were called.

What is the biggest change you have seen the country and people of Kenya undergo?

We have sadly shifted from being nationalistic during the colonial days to being pathologically tribalistic in the post-colonial period. Kenyans are more materialistic than before and the pressures of daily life are stifling. The mass migration to the cities and towns is robbing the rural areas a chance to thrive.

What do you think are some of the big changes yet to come?

Poverty and tribal conflicts are likely to increase, so will corruption, unless steps are taken to remove the sources of these ills. Economic stability continues to evade the average Kenyan and the illiteracy of people with certificates is becoming the norm.

How should we equip ourselves for the journey ahead?

We should provide our youth with a good education that promotes the good values of national unity; encourage cross-tribal marriage; and hand over the baton of leadership to a younger generation of Kenyans.

What are your thoughts on the future ahead?

The future does not look bright unless we unite and think nationally. We fought for undiluted democracy but when it came, we diluted it. I wonder if we will ever get it right despite the intellectual input available.

What are your thoughts on the secret to a long life?

It is important to be happy with yourself and do the best you can with the little you have, and more will come to you. Respect your station in life and work on improving it honestly.

Health?

Health is an ongoing process. The body is constantly changing and you have to deal with it. I am glad to be lucid and able to ambulate independently.

God?

Depends on one’s psychological orientation. There seems to be a proliferation of ways to worship him these days.

Gender roles and gender issues?

Initially there was little respect for women. Presently there is mandatory respect for women enforced by the law. Traditional ethics still seem to dominate gender roles no matter what definition we apply.

Money?

Essential but not always the driving force and never a source of happiness. It lubricates life but is never a source of happiness.

Love?

Depends on its nature. It is the most misunderstood concept next to God, and commercialisation has really distorted its function.

Politics?

It worries me that democracy has totally eluded us. Aspirants in the political sphere have adopted a negative agenda and we the populace are reduced to watching the games. We lack coherent political strategies, much to our detriment.

Education?

It is a sad statement when Parliament is the accreditation body on Education via the act. Kenya continues to have poorly planned educational policies because the people in leadership are not seriously invested in education.

Environment?

The majority of our population is agrarian. It behoves us to increase awareness of the environment for the greater good of all. Planting trees should be mandated by law.

The next generation?

A compromised democracy produces children who are likely to be predisposed to truancy and other societal ills. Poverty predisposes one to engage in acts of murder, violence and lawlessness. The poverty alleviation agenda alone is not likely to be the solution for the next generation.

What makes you happy?

I derive satisfaction from knowing my family and friends are doing well. I have a large network of people I relate to well.

Sad?

I try to be optimistic in the face of challenges that bring about sadness. There is so much of it around, its almost habitual.

Excited?

I am a fellow of restrained passions and way beyond an excitable stage.

What more would you like to tell us?

The state of Kenya’s educational institutions worries me. Retired vice chancellors, commonly known as ‘Maziwa Lala’, previously holding administrator positions, are back in class trying to remember what they used to teach. University managers are enriching themselves on construction projects and unaccredited institutions give degrees on subjects not approved. This is all a reflection of the general malaise the country is undergoing. When are we going to figure out that a compromised education leads to inability to perform as the democratic nation we assert to be?

Prof Okatcha retired June 30th 2013. He spent his final years doing what he had always done. Thinking deeply, speaking plainly and remaining present to the people around him. I was one of those people and I did not know how much that would matter until I was sitting with a coffee table book in my hands, grateful that someone had thought to ask him these questions while he still had answers to give. His words about tribalism, democracy and the next generation read now as a ledger of things we were warned about and chose not to heed. The archive does not only preserve the past. It reveals the present.

We have no shortage of platforms for the voices of the young. What we are losing, quietly and without ceremony, is the other end of the conversation. So again, a polite prompt. Record your elders. Ask them hard questions. The answers will eventually outlast both of you.

Rest in peace, Prof.

You may now purchase my book Strength and Sorrow HERE.

Strength and Sorrow by Oyunga Pala is now available for purchase on Amazon for the Kindle and Paperback HERE.

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When I started my long afternoon walks, it was mostly for my gut. A middle age bulge that was starting to feel like a tire around my waist. For three years in a row, I had paid for gym membership and characteristically stopped going after Valentine’s day in February. You would think that gym management, confronted with a member who had not appeared since the month of plastic love, might put a pause on the subscription out of basic human courtesy. Gyms in this country operate like protection cartels. You wanted fitness, you paid for access to the facility and now you can’t leave. The money leaves your account diligently every month and there is no way to claim it back.

I used to be a gym rat. But somehow in the Netherlands, the gyms have become humdrum. There is something about walking on a treadmill indoors in Amsterdam that makes a man feel he is working extremely hard to remain exactly where he started. Walking to nowhere, my grandmother would say.

So this year, before February I engaged in the tedious bureaucratic process of cancelling my gym membership that I long since abandoned but remained shackled to by direct debit and went route 11 all the way. I started small and worked my way up to a regular 10 kms every Saturday which is nothing to brag about in a country so flat that if you stood on a stool, you could see the German border.

My birthday was coming that Saturday. I never celebrate the day, it won’t have bothered me much but this time I did not want to walk alone. So I made a midnight Facebook post. I attempted a joke about how back home a man could simply step outside and find company and all you had to say was,

“Can you give me a push?”.

I regretted that this post would reveal a sensitive side the moment I pressed, post and thought about deleting it. To my utter shock and surprise, the likes just kept coming and in the morning I woke to eight people showing interest. Two looked straight out dodgy. Can we DM, one asked? The other had a Polish sounding name, Juliusz and when I looked up his picture, he was more Musyoka. Two others thought I was in Kenya and didn’t read past the word, village, and the next guy promised to come if he could find a dog walker for the day. Definitely, the wrong kind of African. Fortunately, three strangers actually committed.

Three African men agreed to come to a village in north Holland to walk with a man they had never met, on the strength of a FaceBook post.

I should have known then, that this was not going to be a simple walk.

The first guy to arrive was from South Africa. He had driven and traveled furthest from Utrecht which is a city somewhere in the middle of the country. We call him Gomora. The second was from Uganda and he came by tram from Amsterdam. The third was an older country man with graying hair. His name was Pius and he looked like a Pius. Portly, bespectacled and the kind of man who finds joy in an open air church crusade.

The first thing Gomora did after he gave me a hug, was apologise for what was going on in his country. He appeared genuinely embarrassed and I tried to assure him that I was good but he kept saying,

“It’s wrong brah!”

The second man was Ugandan, a much younger man with a full head of hair. I had no idea Afro was back in vogue and he had only been in the country for a few months and open to adventure. I started calling him my neighbour, Sebbo, though his official name was John Walker Jr and when we gave him a puzzled look, he explained. “Imagine my father didn’t drink but he drove a van that delivered whiskey to liquor shops and they gave him the nickname”.

We sat there, on the waterfront, the three of us, with the young man chain smoking waiting for the last man, a Kenyan who actually lived in the neighbourhood as he would confess later. He was the last to arrive and he lived exactly 850m from the starting point. He casually arrived on his bicycle one hour late which seemed rude until he explained that he had taken a boat to a customer in Amsterdam via the same Amstel we would be walking alongside and cycled back and suddenly he became the most interesting character in the motley crew.

Finally, we all gathered, four black men, standing out in this Dutch hamlet and you would have thought we were old buddies from the way we were talking and laughing. The planned route was circuitous, along the Amstel river, through the polders, past overweight lazing cows and back to the single main street on the waterfront in Uithoorn to replenish burnt calories with draft beer.

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Just as the walk was about to begin, it started raining. Gomora, who had already apologised a third time that morning for the behaviour of his countrymen, which he described as ‘not ubuntu’, suggested we should wait for it to pass. Pius, a veteran water-man peered at the sky like a cockerel spies a hawk and said it wouldn’t last, pointing to a cloud in the sky. We pulled our hoodies and true to the prediction, hardly fifteen minutes into our walk, the rain stopped and the sun emerged in glorious streaks through the puffy clouds and Gomora wondered how Pius knew without consulting his weather app and he said something in Dutch which he then translated to, after rain comes sunshine. Ssebo started referring to him as “my senior” after that.

Above us, the clouds parted, and wider patches of blue sky emerged and it started getting warm enough for everyone to unzip their jackets. The pace was casual, more like a stroll and Pius was talking a lot. He complained about the inability of black people to stick together in the diaspora. I asked him why. He said it was jealousy. Gomora said it was trauma, “the legacy of divide and rule” but Ssebo disagreed and backed the jealousy claim with lived evidence. He told us about his tribulations, trying to start a business, selling Rolexes in Entebbe and we are not talking about watches. “I was known for my chapati rolex and would have gone far, but my own people bewitched me”.

“That shit doesn’t work”, Pius insisted and I leaned in to hear his response. Ssebo said he also began as a skeptic and he used to be proud of his spirit of generosity. His mother had warned him never to give a certain uncle cash in hand and he ignored her and called her superstitious. After that exchange, he started losing money and attracting all sorts of business troubles and that experience changed him. He didn’t trust easy anymore. By the time Ssebo finished listing the tribulations that followed that handshake, even Pius reluctantly concluded that it was some serious juju.

Then Gomora started telling us about a famous Zulu shaman known as Credo Mutwa who claimed that humanity is secretly controlled by a race of shape shifting reptilian extraterrestrials. You should have seen our faces. He had to produce evidence and played a video on YouTube and this Credo fellow was no cowrie shell rattling, white powdered faced shaman. We actually stopped to listen to Credo predicting COVID in the 90s and it sounded like a conspiracy theory that could be defended in respectable company. And that triggered Pius who made his case for witchcraft in Europe that he had dismissed as harmless cartoons and halloween fun until he caught his own pre teen daughter researching on how to cast a spell on some kids who were bullying her in school.

We were now staring at a muscular brown bull that had stopped grazing and was staring back at us. Ssebo had stopped to take a picture and the bull looked up, like it did not approve. Pius began taunting it and Ssebo said it looked like it went to the gym.

That’s when Gomora put his hand on my shoulder and asked, “ How are you doing, brah?” I instinctively replied, “I’m good” and he looked straight into my eyes and repeated, “ You sure, you good?” and I nodded, “yeah, yeah, I’m good”.

There wasn’t much talking after that. Perhaps because of the path and the silence of the countryside. It was a straight bicycle path, flanked by green empty fields with the occasional flock of wild geese, sheep and cows but empty for the most part and we really looked like aliens in this landscape.

We took a detour on the final stretch and Pius pointed to where his home was. We couldn’t quite tell but he pointed to a cluster of red brick houses across the river and then made a phone call and a white woman appeared on the balcony in the distance. We saw a faint figure waving. That was his wife. When he told us how old his formerly aspiring witch of a daughter was, Ssebo changed his deference to “my elder”.

Pius knew the owners of the brown bar with a jukebox that we settled in after the walk because he fixed their boats and and he conversed with them in Dutch so casually that it felt like he had shape shifted.

Ssebo couldn’t get over the fact that he had been served by a white man old enough to be his father and Gomora thought the draft was so smooth, he stopped to pour libation and said he wanted to make a toast. He confessed he had had his loneliest week in a long time, as a dislocated husband who followed his expat wife to Europe and that my Facebook post spoke to him. He was desperate for male African company. Then Pius and Ssebo both made their confession. Ssebo said he felt like he had been among his uncles and Pius told us, it was his Africanised wife who insisted he stop stereotyping black people and mingle with his own. Then I told them why I had made the post.

“It is my birthday, today”.

And Gomora began to sing and they all broke into song, singing happy birthday and attracted a lot of attention to us. Just when I thought enough guys, Pius started again, and even louder in Dutch and the owner of the bar and his mates joined in.

I was taken aback by the warmth. I had lived in this small village keeping to myself, focusing on what brought me to this country and I had never felt so seen and by absolute strangers. When they finally stopped, I found myself tearing and tried to hide them but Gomora spotted them and asked me if I was alright and the way he said it set something off.

I tried to hold it in but couldn’t. It was embarrassing but they just let me cry, with Gomora putting his hand around my shoulder until I was finished and then I felt I had to explain, “Sorry guys, those are for my mother. This is the first birthday I am celebrating without her” and Gomora hugged me and said, “Brah, You are good now” and these three strangers turned friends, all followed his cue and poured a bit of their drink on the ground in honour of my mother and then we stared at the flat motionless Amstel river for some time in silence before Ssebo asked Pius,

“My elder, is there a beer named after this river?” and we all started laughing from our bellies and for the first time in months, I didn’t have to tell myself, I was good.

You may now purchase my book Strength and Sorrow HERE.

Strength and Sorrow by Oyunga Pala is now available for purchase on Amazon for the Kindle and Paperback HERE.

When the gifted footballer and coach Allan Thigo, the legendary former Harambee Stars and Gor Mahia midfielder, was cremated at the Hindu crematorium in Kisumu, I understood immediately what the family had chosen to absorb.

I have stood in a Hindu crematorium twice. I know what it feels like when the flame is ignited. I know the white sheet, the logs piled over the pyre, the body disappearing into the build-up of fire at the base. The first time was in Nakuru, for my friend Sunny’s father. The second time was in Kampala. That time, I was the one who lit the fire. It was my sister’s body on the pyre.

I listened to Allan Thigo’s widow describe his last wishes. He did not want a fuss. No self-serving politicians. No extended ceremony. He had managed his illness privately, with dignity, and he wanted his exit to match his endurance. Get it done in 72 hours.

It was all deja vú.

My sister had made the exact same request. And I knew, in a way you only know when you have watched someone you love negotiate a long illness on their terms, exactly what that request meant. To have witnessed the suffering is to understand the decision. The cremation was not the radical act. The illness was. By the time you are lighting the fire you are simply finishing what they started.

I understand now what my sister was really doing. Cremation was not a rejection of tradition. It was her last act of mercy.

She had watched what prolonged illness does to a family. The vigils, the hospital rounds, the held breath, the slow deterioration of the body and the grinding weight of care. And yet, even in the depths of her own suffering, she remained fixated on sparing us. That is the irony. That a person can be in the middle of dying and still be thinking about how the living must carry on.

It matters little that we would have given all and more without complaint. The cremation was her way of saying, I release you. Get it done quickly. No exhausting logistics. No politics. No burial drama. Finish, and then rest. Grieve, and then live.

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That is what I carried from the crematorium in Kampala. Not transgression. Mercy.

It is no light decision for the one who must carry it out. Nothing quite prepares you for the role of executor of the last rites. It is as though the task falls, by design, on those who truly loved because it is the only thing strong enough to counter the rapture of loss. In that moment, fire takes on a sacred role. It becomes a vehicle of release rather than destruction. And yet nothing in our socialisation has prepared us to see it that way.

Fire is the medium of divine punishment. My Christian upbringing introduced us to hellfire and brimstone early. It was the first real resident fear. Paint that image to a child and the fear takes root in the depths of their soul, where it stays. Add the complexity of a loving creator who is also the ultimate punisher. Fire represents wrath, eternal suffering, the end of all hope. And in the theology of redemption and resurrection, the body is not yours to destroy but merely on loan, awaiting restoration. To subject it to fire is to extinguish that hope entirely. The personhood becomes what burns. Nothing remains to be called back.

That is the weight of what Allan Thigo’s family absorbed. That is the weight I carried into the Hindu crematorium in Kampala.

And yet, listening to Allan Thigo’s widow speak, I understood exactly why he chose fire. I understood why my sister chose it too.

Who taught Africans to be afraid of fire touching the dead and what did that fear displace?

In Greek mythology, fire is stolen from the gods for humanity. Fire is divine property. Humans receive it through transgression and the relationship with fire begins in theft and punishment.

African fire origin stories are structured differently. Fire is not stolen. It is discovered, negotiated or given. Fire is the instrument of transformation of raw material into functional form. In many traditions, the blacksmith is a sacred figure precisely because of his ability to control fire. Fire in many of our indigenous shamanic traditions was the threshold between the living and the ancestral, a portal to the spiritual world.

In my own Luo heritage, the word for a funeral gathering or ceremony and physical grave is a noun, “liel”. The same word can also be used as a verb to mean, “burning or blazing”. When we say, “mach liel”, it refers to a burning fire.

Liel, it turns out, has fire inside it.

It appears somewhere in the long arc of our history, the relation to fire was displaced and all that remained was the word, stripped of its sacred fire.

Allan Thigo knew what he was asking for. My sister knew what she was asking for. Perhaps they both knew something the rest of us had forgotten. That to be given to fire is not erasure. In Dholuo, we have always called the last rites, liel. We just forgot what the word meant.

When I lit my sister’s pyre in Kampala, I did not know I was performing the oldest rite we had. I thought I was honouring a wish. It turns out, I was answering to something much older than that.

Mach Liel. The fire is burning. This is how we have always sent our dead home.

You may now purchase my book Strength and Sorrow HERE.

Strength and Sorrow by Oyunga Pala is now available for purchase on Amazon for the Kindle and Paperback HERE.

Why is it always the brilliant lights that extinguish young and die badly? I can’t keep up with the stories I have encountered of brilliant young people, all promising, hoarding every cliché that spells a bright future and then they die, often stupidly and mostly cruelly. Their deaths are so unjust that the instant response is rage that quickly gives way to resignation. I have been asking this question all my life and still do every time a bad death is brought to my attention.

I was barely five when my uncle Apollo died. He was my father’s youngest brother and the first of a generation to seek higher education in Europe. He was training to be an architect. Brilliant, tall, kind, bold, progressive and stylist. This was a young African into gymnastics in the 70s and that’s where death found him, in the gym, staying in shape. My sister described the depth of the sorrow. They wailed for Apollo. Not him. Not our best, our finest, the coolest cat we had ever seen. Gone. He was 25.

I was too young to remember meeting him but I grew up with his pictures and his stories. His name endured through two generations and we always had his grave. No one ever explained how to make sense of it and I took the Christian view. That God takes his best early. It is what I heard throughout all the eulogies of sudden deaths of the young and brilliant. Or that they were restless souls and the ancestors called them back. All of these explanations tried to bring meaning to tragedy but none of them sat well enough.

I applied the same logic to tragic heroes who paid the ultimate price and many of those individuals have stayed with me over the decades. I am talking about men I had never met but I gave their deaths meaning, for their existence had influenced my outlook of life.

I still think about Tupac Shakur. He was 25 when he died in a drive-by shooting. I don’t consider him the greatest rapper to have ever lived but his gift was unmistakable and the world recognised his talent, even those not into hip hop. He was three years older than me when he died and I remember being shocked at the injustice of it all. Here I was in Nairobi mourning a hip hop artiste, literally across the world, who I had never met. The day the news broke, I was genuinely sad and I was not alone in my sadness.

I felt the same sadness when E-Sir, South C’s finest, died at 21 in a road accident. He was lyrically gifted and a poster boy of a city that was discovering its own voice. I had never met him, even though I wrote about urban culture in the same city he was making his mark and I mourned E-Sir like he was a kid bro.

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Then there was James Ochola Odhiambo,aka Jordoo. He was a uni student, 24 and in his final year in USIU when he was shot in the streets of Nairobi in a case of mistaken identity. He was a contemporary during my college years. I knew his mother. He died ugly and the injustice of it all turned him into a tragic hero for my college peers. I never imagined a mother could ever recover from a loss of that nature.

I have a long list of men of renown that I regularly pay tribute to. Nationalists who died before I was born but my attachment to their deaths must have something to do with the cruel manner in which their brilliance was extinguished and their youthfulness.

Pio Gama Pinto was 37 when he died from an assassin’s bullet. When I was in my 30s, I used to work around the Sarit Centre in Westlands in Nairobi and would walk past the road named after him almost daily. I never really appreciated his revolutionary significance until I found out during a writing research venture, that Pinto and Malcolm X were kindred spirits and that Pinto had persuaded Malcolm to move beyond black nationalism to a broader Pan African solidarity. They died just three days apart, both by an assassins’ bullet in February 1965. February is my birth month and I made a bigger deal of that connection than I probably should.

They weren’t the only ones. There was Walter Rodney. Assassinated at 38. Tom Mboya gunned down at 38. Dedan Kimathi, hanged at 36. I have mourned these symbols of liberation throughout my life as a journalist. I know their death anniversaries and they often served as mascots in my renditions of what Kenya, Africa, could have been if they weren’t erased so early.

When Kelvin Kiptum set a new world marathon record in Chicago bringing it within a whistling breath of a sub 2 hour marathon, I vowed to watch him race in Rotterdam the next year, where it was predicted he would break his own record and achieve the herculean sub 2 hour marathon feat. I had written about Eliud Kipchoge after he broke the world record in Berlin and tracked him through to Vienna during the successful INEOS 1:59 challenge. I was in that crowd of journalists when Eliud famously said, “ This is about history and leaving a legacy”. Kiptum, coming to Rotterdam while I was resident in the Netherlands, felt like celestial alignment. The Rotterdam marathon was scheduled for April. Kiptum died in a car accident in February. He was 24 years of age.

I have reflected on this for a long time. Why do certain memories stick and while many others, I can barely recall? Is it because these individuals in my ledger were unicorns? Young people die all the time. How many young women do we lose regularly in Kenya, and why haven’t a more significant number made my list?

I thought about this as I read the recent tragic news report of a school dormitory fire that killed sixteen young girls at Utumishi Girls Academy in Kenya. The familiar feelings arrived. The rage and the grief and then they drift in the way feelings do when they find nothing to anchor to. They may have been brilliant and young and they were most certainly innocent but none of that could protect them from a most cruel fate. The only reason the country is even talking about them is because of how badly they died and the raw emotion on display that tore their loved ones apart. But I doubt I will remember them and hold their memories sacred as I do for Pinto, Kiptum and Jordoo.

Yet, these young girls were somebody’s Apollo. They have mothers, fathers and siblings who must have wailed for them like my family wailed for my uncle. Even though it is my role as a grief writer to see patterns, I am unable to hold their deaths with the same fierce sacredness I hold for my uncle.

Grief, after all, is not democratic. We mourn what mirrors us. My ledger is full of deaths that are reminders of the fullness of life I have wanted to embrace and the parts of myself that had died along the way. I recognise myself in their unlived futures.

There is a single black and white image of my uncle Apollo, that hung in my grandparents house for decades. In that picture he wore tapered trousers that flared at the bottom, a shirt with long lapels and large collars, his neck down to his sternum exposed and he sported a huge Afro. It is not a smiling picture. Pensive, would be closer to it. I can still see a distant sadness in his eyes that I now acknowledge represents a part of my future that was lost and this is why, I recognise this loss everywhere I look.

You may now purchase my book Strength and Sorrow HERE.

Strength and Sorrow by Oyunga Pala is now available for purchase on Amazon for the Kindle and Paperback HERE.

A big tree has fallen. Everyone heard it fall. It fell after three in the afternoon and it came crashing down with a resounding noise that the valley carried far. It made an ominous sound, one rarely heard but everyone knew what it was. It could only be one tree. The biggest in the village.

This is not a good sign, Dana said. It was an old tree that everyone knew and had a relationship with. A prominent landmark, where so many important things had happened. It is what you used to give visitors directions. The village gathered under it to discuss their affairs. The children played under its canopy and climbed its lower branches. In the hot months, the hawkers claimed spots under its shade. The preachers too. The birds gathered there and many had built nests on it. Everyone had a story about this tree, even the children could tell you something about the tree. There were so many trees in the village but this tree stood apart because it felt like the village grew around it.

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It was an enormous tall tree that had been around forever. Dana says that when she arrived as a young bride in the village, it was already huge and through her whole life she had never imagined it could fall. It had withstood all the great storms and on a quiet afternoon under a gentle breeze, it fell. When the people gathered after the fall, they were perplexed by its sheer size, lying horizontal and blocking the road.

Several of its top branches were broken and it smothered trees underneath it. When it hit the ground, its entangled roots were lifted off the ground, exposed. They now formed a webbed wall that reached higher than the roof of a house. The massive trunk was long and it stretched across the road like a bridge. The children climbed on it and people took pictures. One could now see the signs of decay and rot and the exact spot where it first snapped before toppling over on its own weight.

The sky above was now open, it felt vast in a way that was not noticeable before. The place felt exposed and vulnerable. Dana said it had hidden its cracks so well. How come no one seemed to have noticed that it had started shattering years before? Where would the village find another shelter this mighty? Maybe, they would have moved with urgency. Called the tree doctor or found a way to buttress its trunk like the Europeans do to their old trees. Or at the least gathered under its canopy one last time to bid it farewell.

Dana told me we had forgotten how to care for trees. We no longer saw them as family. We just thought of them as scenery, forgetting that they too, were once young and in need of nurturing. They had become so familiar that they were rendered invisible. And because of this, we had forgotten what they were doing and the invisible work they put in for us. We had been sheltered for so long we stopped thinking about shelter. And because we never understood its contribution, we still have no idea how colossal this loss is.

Who is going to teach us now how to keep growing and to age with purpose and intention? How to live a long life well? Trees are our elders sent to us by nature but we have forgotten how to relate and to learn from them. We are raising a generation that doesn’t know how to grow old and we are a society that thinks there is nothing to learn from what has aged.

My big tree was Professor Shem Oyoo Wandiga and I received news of his passing late last week. I first met him during my induction interview as a young member of the United Kenya Club in Nairobi. He was one the reasons I wanted to join a members club because he embodied a calibre of gentleman that was rare. I remember his steady presence at the club, seated in the corner of the bar, in the evenings, with his band of seniors, mostly jovial, sharing a bottle of wine.

When I joined the board of directors, he was my mentor and throughout my two terms, he was one of the few elders you could take a problem to and expect to be heard and validated. He knew my sister well and when she died, he told me sorry with such sincerity that I had no doubt that he could witness my grief. Our last physical meeting was at the club, when I handed him a signed copy of my book, Strength and Sorrow and I saw that validation, once again in his kind eyes and gentle voice.

As I read the tributes on Professor Wandiga from others who had known him from the different facets of his life, I could not help but think, he had sheltered so many others. My sky was now open and I felt exposed to the elements.

And so I asked Dana, teach me, how do I remember the teachings of a great tree and she said, remember to remain grounded no matter how high we rise in the sky, to stay connected to our roots, for it is roots that hold us up, to shed, turn and change with the seasons and let go of the parts of us that have died, to yield and bend through the storms of life, and to keep growing and giving until our last breath.

As I contemplate in the vacuum of his absence, I know I have to do more than just mourn the falling of a mighty tree. I have to learn how to live like one and to learn the art of sheltering others unconditionally long before they even see the value of shelter they stand under.

******

If you enjoyed this read, you can purchase my book Strength and Sorrow HERE.

Strength and Sorrow by Oyunga Pala is also available for purchase on Amazon for the Kindle and Paperback HERE.

It was a black night. Moonless. Not even a lone star was visible in the sky. And it got darker after the power outage began at 8pm just as the rains started. There was a heavy downpour but it didn’t last. Kip heard the transformer blow. The village was plunged into silence and darkness. Kip had just finished his first week at this rural police post, and he had really been looking forward to binging on Tik Tok. But with the power gone, he would have to ration his entertainment to save his phone’s battery life. These power black outs could last for days because the Kenya Power technicians weren’t the most motivated. Getting them to leave the offices in Siaya would require a call from someone influential.

Everyone in the police post was asleep by 10pm because there was really nothing to do once the power went out and Kip, who was on the night shift, braced for a long uneventful night, listening to the chorus of crickets and faint roar of the river in the distance that was now humming like steady traffic flow.

Corporal Waf, who was his senior, a man old enough to be his father, had scheduled a foot patrol to do an operation on some chang’aa brewers but the rains had killed that plan. It had stopped raining now, and Waf asked him to stay on duty which meant manning the desk. Kip had been told that no one ever stayed up at night but the area MP had been around the week before and complained to the OCS that the police only collect bribes from illicit alcohol brewers and so they had to maintain the optics for at least a few days.

Kip was scrolling through his feed when he heard a scream piercing through the night and he stepped out of the office but all he encountered was the silence of the night. He looked at the time and it was ten minutes past midnight. He couldn’t make out the direction and hearing no new sounds, he returned to his phone.

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Approximately, 15 minutes later, a motorcycle rumbled into the compound of the police post. Riding it was a young man sporting dreadlocks. They could have been the same age but he looked flustered and the state of his hair made him look more dishevelled and suspicious. His voice was shaky and desperate. He was asking for Afande Waf.

“Something very bad has happened, I need Afande?”

Kip threatened to throw him in the cell if he didn’t stop asking for Afande Waf and demanded that he state his reason for wanting to wake up the Corporal past midnight. After listening to him, Kip went quickly and banged on Waf’s door and the corporal appeared bare chested with a shuka tied around his waist, his protruding belly dangling over and he was in a foul mood.

The young man who had brought the news shouted a greeting from the distance,

“Afande, ni Rasta” and Waf peered over Kip’s shoulder and returned his gaze to Kip,

“I hope this is serious” and the younger police officer explained the reason for his intrusion. He noticed Waf’s demeanor changed when he mentioned the name of the home where the incident was reported.

“Did you say, mzee Shem home, hmm?” Waf’s face had now turned contemplative.

He retreated back into his house and when he emerged he was dressed in full uniform and donning a combat fatigue jacket and a beret. He strapped his G3 rifle on his shoulder and instructed Kip to grab his gun and follow him. There was a sudden urgency in his step as they straddled the motorcycle, Kip in the middle, sandwiched between Waf and Rasta, the rider. The cold air whipped them as the bike lunged into the squishy earth, throwing their bodies against each other. The darkness was total and it smothered everything around it. The only thing fighting back was the trembling beam of the head lamp punching a hole through the blackness to reveal rocks and thick bush lining the road side. It was a short uphill ride through the stony murram road to a homestead that sat on a plateau and the hum of the river was more distinct from that elevation.

The first odd thing that Kip noticed when the motorcycle’s head lamplight flooded the compound was a distressed elderly woman pacing about the homestead, like she had lost her mind, mumbling to herself.There was a young woman, who bore a close resemblance watching her movements. A lantern had been placed on a three legged curved stool and next to it was a small black leather bound bible. The compound had two houses. A central mud walled house that faced the gateless entrance and next to it, on the right hand side, a larger modern brick house with a L-shaped verandah. In between the two houses was a tall water tank tower and sitting on top of it a large black water tank. As soon as they dismounted from the motorcycle, Rasta pointed at the water tank and Kip’s torch light crawled up the side to reveal a sight that made Waf gasp.

Hanging just below the water tank was a chunky male body. Fully dressed, black shoes, black trousers and white shirt. It was suspended in mid-air, the thick, braided sisal rope cinched into a heavy noose around the throat.

Waf handed Kip his gun and started scaling the metal water tower structure with an agility that Kip did not realise he possessed. He got up to the level of the body without much strain, keenly studying the body using a flash light and careful not to touch it. Then he shouted at Kip to secure the perimeter and ensure that no one came into the homestead.

He climbed back down and made a phone call, spoke rapidly before he turned to Rasta and instructed him to go and fetch the other police man at the post. His name was Brown. They would need all the manpower they had. Then he returned to his phone and started calling a number frantically. It rang for a long time and there was no answer. He tried, again and again and the third time a groggy voice came on the line and Kip noticed Waf straightening up, his other arm lined up on his side like a soldier in a parade. He was speaking to his boss, the OCS at the mother station in Yala. All Kip could hear him say was,

“Yes, Sir! Ndiyo Sir! Yes, Sir!

As he finished the call, Rasta’s bike emerged from the blackness with Brown, the other police man from the post, a tall, lanky, fair skinned man. His jaw dropped when he laid eyes on the suspended dead man. The three men moved in closer to the steel frame of the water tower, almost under the dangling shoes of the suspended body.

Waf took a deep breath and stepped into the centre of the huddle and laid out the protocol. They couldn’t cut the rope. They would have to document the scene and secure the home until the detectives arrived from Siaya.

Kip was to guard the perimeter and Brown was to look around the compound and into the houses for evidence. Kip was now thankful for the rain and the power outage. If the village got wind of this, and found the body, they would demand it to be brought down.

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All this while, the older woman just sat on a stool next to the lantern in absolute stillness with the younger woman beside her mimicking the older woman’s rigid posture. But when Waf pulled a chair and sat next to her to begin the interview, she was in no position to talk. She was shivering and so Waf waited patiently until her rapid breathing subsided and the older woman announced, “Now I can talk”.

He began by trying to persuade her to enter the house away from the horror of the sight as they did their police work but she was firm in her refusal.

“How can I stay in the house, yet my son is sleeping out alone in the cold?”

Waf looked at her face that was partly illuminated by the lantern light and he could see the brokenness in her eyes. He instructed the younger woman to fetch her some water and then returned to find Kip snarling at the hanging body.

“Look at this fool”, he pointed, “Making his mother suffer, for what, useless, kabisa! Weak men, will always perish foolishly”

Waf did not react and instead reiterated his instructions. No one comes into the homestead. We secure this home until the forensics guys arrive with their Land Cruiser from Siaya.

“We don’t know how long they will take but pray to God they get here before the morning because once the village wakes up, it will be chaos”.

Then he walked away to speak to Brown who had just finished his sweep of the brick house.

“What do you think?” he asked and Brown dug a finger into his nose and pinched it. He looked at the hanging man and asked Waf,

“Isn’t this your friend?” and then shook his head looking at Waf, “Pole sana” and he tapped Waf’s shoulder.

Waf didn’t answer but they both looked up at the dark mass of the hanging man at the same time, the distress of the scene shared among them in silence before Brown became formal.

“I haven’t found anything suspicious? I think we know what this is…come…I want to show you something”.

Brown led Waf to the verandah of the brick house and behind the low wall was a single white plastic chair and a square wooden table. Placed on it was an empty glass with the remnants of liquor and an empty bottle on the floor. Then Brown shone the ground, following a path that pointed to shoe prints on the stairs leading out to the compound.

“I suspect it happened after the black out and he must have taken advantage of the rain and power cut. Who discovered the body?”

Waf turned and looked in the direction of the elderly woman.

“She was answering a call of nature around midnight”.

Brown followed his gaze and clicked his lips,

“Aaa ya-ya-ya! Poor woman”.

Waf continued, “She was the last person to see him alive. They had an early meal together and he told her, “he was tired and he was going to sleep”.

Waf stared deeply into Brown’s eyes and Brown could see his angst in them and then back at the elderly woman who they could now hear lamenting.

“The young woman is her niece. She was the one who fetched Rasta. He is an immediate neighbour. We are lucky because of that rain, the village is sleeping deeply. I hope the Siaya people get here before dawn or it will get hectic if the elders get involved”.

Kip found them huddled together in silence and reported that the perimeter was secure.

He looked up at the body and shook his head.

“This home is now cursed for generations. Just selfish and then you hear that it was because of a woman!” and he clicked his tongue.

The two older policemen did not respond and their silence began to bother Kip who kept talking.

“Kwani, he didn’t have any friends he could talk to? What is this now?”

It was Brown who placed his hand on Kip’s shoulder and told him, “His mama is seated there. Let’s show some respect”.

That remark got Kip defensive, “I am not disrespecting anyone. I am telling my truth” and with that Waf told him to go back to his station, manning the entrance. Soon after Rasta emerged again from the darkness with a set of plastic chairs and all three men grabbed one and sat down. Waf and Brown sat next to the tank and Kip further away, near the entrance.

At first the darkness held its shape. Kip could barely make out the tank tower from his position nor the body and he had this eerie sense of the dead man watching him. The lantern’s flame was the only light in the home and its unsteady light cast shadows on the mud wall behind the two women. The older woman was no longer whimpering and in the silence that followed Kip heard the river again humming louder as if the stillness of the night had turned up its volume.

Every so often, he noticed that Waf flashed the body with his torch light and he wondered if the corporal was superstitious. Then the cocks began. The first cry distant and a second answered from somewhere nearer and that set off a call criss crossing the dark valley. A dog howled once and it was still again. The darkness receded unexpectedly and Kip noticed that he could now make out the silhouette of the body. An unseen bird made a call announcing the coming of dawn.

The sky changed from black to deep blue and the stars that had been invisible all night came into view. The dead body which had been temporarily forgotten, became visible again as the darkness withdrew making way for daylight. The second cock’s crow came as a chorus and in its wake Kip heard the far-off grind of a familiar engine.

Waf heard it too and looked at the time on his phone. It read ten minutes to five. They could hear the sound of the vehicle getting closer.

Kip finally asked Waf the question he had been holding through the night.

“Senior, sorry if I offended you but do you know this man?”

“Yes”, Waf said after a pause, “I know him well”

Then Kip asked “Do you know why he would do this to himself?”

Waf let out a long sigh and then spoke,

“It doesn’t matter to me what his reasons were but I will tell you something, this village has lost a good man”.

“What do you mean?”

“6 years ago, when I was still very new here, my daughter almost died from malaria. The wife was alone. I was far away. We had gone for an operation in Kisumu, law and order in Kondele, campaign time. He used to have a car those days. When they asked him, he didn’t hesitate. He drove my wife and daughter to Siaya General hospital in the middle of the night and they put her on drip. Her temperature had reached 40 degrees! My first born daughter is doing her form four exams this year, because of this man”.

The motor of a police vehicle driving into the compound interrupted their conversation. Coming through the entrance was a dark blue police Land Cruiser pick up. Waf adjusted his beret and tugged on the strap of his rifle and then walked towards the parked vehicle as two men opened the car doors.

Kip watched him walk away and then turned to the dangling dead body and for the first time that night, he noticed that the dead man’s shoes were polished.

You may now purchase my book Strength and Sorrow HERE.

Strength and Sorrow by Oyunga Pala is now available for purchase on Amazon for the Kindle and Paperback HERE.

Keep your house clean like you are expecting guests and keep your heart clean like you are expecting death.

— Arabic proverb

After the publication of my book on navigating grief, Strength and Sorrow, Reflections on the Ones We Lost, I really did not expect the book to pull me under. The initial conceptualisation was in search of closure. I was trying to respond to the passing of my own sister, Nyangi. I needed to come to terms with the rawness of loss and make sense of it. How does one go on after the true rapture of the spirit? The book was supposed to be my personal story of vulnerability but I was surprised by the conversations it opened and the number of people who found and reflected on their own stories through my accounts of grief.

Hence I found myself inducted into a world of grief, drawn by intuitive instinct as an anthropologist and writer making sense of the world around them. I began as a writer who thought they were observing grief and discovered that I was living inside it. I realised that I couldn’t approach this topic as an expert but rather as a journeyman and that became a fundamental shift on how I viewed grief and loss in general. Thus began, the Alchemy of Grief series on Substack.

There is a parable from the Buddhist tradition known as Kisa Gotami and the Mustard Seed. In this story, a mother carries her dead child to the venerable Buddha, begging him to restore life. The Buddha listens to her in compassion and then sends her off on an errand. Find a mustard seed from a household that has never known death or loss. She goes from door to door and every house whose door she knocks on, has tasted grief. She eventually returns empty handed and in that emptiness, her understanding arrives.

I tell a version of this story in my book following the loss of my father as a young teen. It was when my eyes truly opened to the universality of loss. I thought then, I had confronted it but it was not until I started writing about grief that I realised I still lacked the language to describe the journey.

Writing became a necessity for confronting the grief that surrounded me and a shield against the compassion fatigue. I did not want to become numb to the experience of others journeying through their own seasons for how could I forget all those kind hands that held me through my own. It is one thing to acknowledge that everyone is carrying something. It is another to do something about it. Every other day on my social feed, someone that I know personally or by association announces bereavement. How do I remain open without being emptied and exhausted? How do I not respond in frustration to every unsolicited addition to a Whatsapp funeral fundraiser? How do I ensure my compassion doesn’t run dry?

This is why I turned to writing. It allows me to sit in it and through the experiences of the past three years I come to realise what I was doing. The term I use is the alchemy of grief that inspired the title of my book. From sorrow to strength and the understanding that the goal is not erasure of grief but the transformation of raw loss into something that can be held, examined and passed on. I got over the notion of healing and instead became a witness and a craftsman. This is what got me to start writing short stories that speak to multiple experiences of grief and loss. ( Read the Series here)

In a way, I started out like the innocent fish in water analogy given by David Foster Wallace from a speech titled This Is Water.

Two small fishes are swimming in the ocean when they meet a big fish who asks them “How is the water today?” They do not respond and after a short distance, one small fish asks the other, “What is water?” The small fish don’t know they are in water because they have never lived outside of it. Many people are like the two little fishes from this analogy. Grief is invisible until it hits so close to home, making itself visible in the most earth shattering manner.

So this is an invitation to join me every week (on Wednesday) in conversations around loss and grief, rendered through my short stories and reflections. I do not write from a place of arrival but from inside an ongoing journey. Like the small fish that eventually learns the name of what surrounds it, I am describing the experience of moving through grief, story by story, reflection by reflection.

I have chosen to stay in the water and learn its nature rather than reach for a shore that exists outside of reality. Therefore, if you ever felt like a small fish in a sea of grief, you will find company here.

Subscribe to my substack page and join the community.

Pili looked out of the window of her home office, peeping to see if the bins were getting collected. There was a waste management app that could send notifications for the collection days but she preferred to just look out of the window to see if the neighbours had put their bins out. She could see some orange bins lined up on the pavement. The truck came around after 10 in the morning. She had missed the last collection and her bin was stuffed to the brim. But it was too rare a morning to be rushed. The sun was out and the skies were clear and she sat back and took a sip out of her coffee flask.

Her morning had just opened up.

A client had canceled their coaching session just 5 minutes to the hour. She decided to do some administrative work and put together some client testimonials. It had been 15 months since she began her life coaching practice and it was very slow in the beginning, with only two clients and then she got one reference and landed a corporate client. She was now seeing up to 8 clients a month.

She opened her personal website, stared at her cover photo, pleased,

“That photo shoot was worth it” and then she moved on to her mission statement.

“To service Africans both in the diaspora and at home seeking relatable and insightful guidance on personal growth, cultural identity and professional development from a coach who understands their nuanced experiences”.

Pili hovered her cursor over the word “nuanced” in her mission statement. Nuanced experiences. Her first line was more poetic:

“Success isn’t linear; it’s a nuanced dance between heritage and ambition.”

She leaned back in the ergonomic chair and looked out at the quiet street. It was a sun-drenched day, the kind that demanded a walk, but not before she had edited three more testimonials to anchor her new landing page.

Then the phone rang, and she wondered if it was another potential client. It was an unrecognized number, beginning with +254.

“Hello, is this Pili?”

“Hey Pili, Sally here, Sally from Rotary”

Sally was an old professional colleague and they had been board members at the Rotary club in Nairobi and she had not seen her since she moved to Amsterdam.

The small talk followed. The predictable dance of weather and children. Sally said she had been following her progress on social media.

‘I’ve been watching your tips on Tik Tok. Really deep stuff” Sally said. “That’s why I am calling. My nephew…he’s lost direction, I need your advice.”

Pili straightened her posture, the “Coach” persona clicking into place.

“Does he need a consultation? I usually start with an exploratory call.”

“This one I was just asking as a favour. He has defeated his mother. She has left him in God’s hands. Me, the things he says, I don’t understand. They sound like cultist things. At least you, there in Europe, maybe you can understand him better”.

Sally’s voice was now a whisper, “He doesn’t engage with the family. Always locked in his room with a computer. He also smokes bhang. We think he is depressed. Doesn’t want to talk to any of us but you…. he is the one who showed me your clips on Tik Tok. I didn’t even know you became a coach? He thought I was joking when I said I know you. You are a Rotarian. He follows your account. By the way, you have many followers.…Can you just talk to him?”

The plea in the voice was clear and Sally had always been a kind colleague. Pili mulled over it briefly and decided one phone call would be less pain than a flat. She could chalk it up as one pro-bono missionary conversation to keep the coaching instinct sharp.

The nephew’s name was Obam, which Pili originally thought was a mispronunciation of Orban and immediately asked about the connection to Hungary but it was actually Obam. Not Obama. Obam.

Pili had decided to call Obam as soon as she received his number for scheduling before work got in the way.

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10:05 Pili allocates thirty minutes from what she has gathered after speaking to Sally. She is hearing resistance to authority figures, stuck, not adulting, probably three sessions. His way of speaking is lazy and there are long lulls between his thoughts. She is mid-assessment when he starts talking about her latest videos.

“Who makes your music beds?”

“I do them myself” Pili said proudly

“I find them depressing”

Pili leans back, her neck tilting backwards on her ergonomic chair. No one has ever called her sombre music depressing. He was quiet again and just as she thinks to speak, he speaks again,

“You know that closing line you use, “Life doesn’t happen to you: it happens for you” - I have been thinking about it and that line would make no sense to a refugee in the Gaza strip right now.”

Pili turns her head to one side, as if she was not hearing right. She has no comeback.

10:36 The conversation has taken a turn. Pili has decided she will not be lured into an argument and switches subjects asking if he has ever been to Amsterdam. His voice changes when he starts talking about the city. The bicycles. The canals. The Red Light district. What’s not to like? Then he asks about the coffee shops.That is what he really wants to experience. The freedom of it all.

“Have you been to one?”

“Nay, nay, nay, I don’t even know where they are”

“You live in Amsterdam and you’ve never been to a coffee shop?”

“That’s nothing! I have never been to a tulip farm and I love tulips”

“Have you at least smoked a joint?”

“Never”

“Never”

“Not even when you were young”

“Clean as a whistle”.

Pili leans back again on her chair and stares at the ceiling.

“You know what I just realised”, she says after a moment, “ How old are you?”

“26”

“I am much older than you, I live in Amsterdam and I have never wanted to experience weed”.

“I guess it’s not your thing,” he replies.

She thinks about it. He is right. Booze. Weed. Mood enhancers. She has never been drawn to it. She had always thought it was fear.

Weed will make you paranoid and I can’t have anyone seeing me lose control.

Thirty minutes has gone quickly and they have not even touched on the reason for the call.

10:58 Pili hears the sound of a truck but she doesn’t want to be distracted listening keenly to what Obam is sharing. He is now asking her about mushrooms, informing her about their legality in the Netherlands. Another reason he wants to visit. No wonder Sally described it as cultist.

“Where do you get magic mushrooms in Kenya?”

“A friend knew a diplomat who came in with a stash and had a private party. That is where I did it. In Spring Valley. It was a very bad trip. Never mix it with alcohol.”

He speaks matter-of-fact, in that same boring drawl.

“The mushroom showed me my demons”

She will need to recommend a psychologist.

Obam is talking about unresolved hallucinations. But it is fascinating that he has no filter. He is just sharing his experiences like he has been dying to have someone listen to what he went through.

This is above her pay grade.

And so she is led by curiosity.

What was it like? What about after? Would you do it again?

11:14 Obam asks her a question, “ Why are you not married?”

Pili answers without thinking.

“It was never my thing”

“Yaah, I get that”. He returns to his quiet.

Pili has fallen into this rhythm of talking and then quiet.

“Are you seeing someone?”

“No?”

“Not your thing?” Pili teases

“Just not my thing”, he responds.

“Has anyone ever told that you have an old soul?”

“No!” says Obam, “They say I have an old liver”

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11:33 Pili laughs badly. It is a mama mboga laugh, one part disbelief and the other part unrestrained amusement, arm flailing. Then laughs at how she laughed and that gets Obam laughing.

“Why are you laughing” she asks in between her chuckles

“Because you are laughing”

11:47 Obam asks about the time and Pili runs a finger through her dreadlocks.

“Did the garbage truck come?”

Pili doesn’t answer, she gets up and walks to the window. The truck has come and gone. There are misaligned bins with open flaps on the street. She curses. She shouldn’t have ignored her instincts again. When she returns to the call, she tells him what an inconvenience garbage scheduling is and asked Obam how he knows about the truck.

“It was the first thing you said when we started the call, that you might have to leave when you hear the garbage truck”.

She only said it to break the ice.

12:09 Obam asks Pili “How is it living in a city where everyone cycles?” and she surprises herself when she says she doesn’t own a bicycle. Why? and you live in Amsterdam? Pili has never learnt how to cycle. She is too afraid she will fall on these hard cobblestone cycle paths. Friends have offered to teach her but she has turned them all down.

She remembers the time she fell as a child and all her friends laughed at her. She has never really gone back there. It is not about the bicycle, she thinks, and then does not finish the thought.

“That’s what I realised about the shrooms. I was trying to control the experience, when I should have surrendered. I knew this was what I was supposed to do, but I couldn’t do it. I thought I was going to lose my sanity and panicked properly. It landed me in hospital”

“What did the doctors say”

“This one is just high. Keep him hydrated and let him sleep it off”.

Pili laughs. In Amsterdam they would have done the same and then recommended paracetamol.

12:44 Pili says, “ I must go now”

Obam says, “ Wow, we have talked since 10”

“Yah, it is not what I expected”

“Neither did I”.

You may now purchase my book Strength and Sorrow HERE.

Strength and Sorrow by Oyunga Pala is now available for purchase on Amazon for the Kindle and Paperback HERE.

One of the most underrated survival skills for living in a foreign country is reading the daily news. If Beno had bothered to look at his news feed that morning, he would have known that railway workers had been on a strike for the last three days and that led to cancellations of all services in Noord-Holland. Services to Schiphol airport where he made his connection had been reduced to four per hour in both directions from Amsterdam’s central station. When he arrived at the platform in the late afternoon, it was filled with grumpy commuters, most like him, caught unawares, staring at the schedule screens in increasing frustration. Beno thought of an alternative route, using the slow bus. But that would mean at least four connections and it would be no fun walking across the city with a bulky baby stroller.

He had already gone out of his way, to pick up a used baby stroller that was in great condition. It was a hand me down gift by another country man. The man stayed in Amsterdam-Noord, a journey that involved taking a ferry across the IJ river to the Siberia of Amsterdam.

The platform was packed with people all on their phones managing anxiety. He saw another black man approaching from the distance and was drawn to his clean look and well groomed goatee with streaks of grey before he noticed that the man had locked eye contact with him and was smiling. He looked vaguely familiar when the man got closer he realised he recognised the face, though not his name. That bothered him, because the man gave him a warm brotherly hug and called him by his name.

Then they started small talk. He had not known about the strike and had a longer journey to a different city known as Utrecht. The acquaintance was also Kenyan and he reminded Beno that they had met at a barbeque in the park many summers ago, organised by a veteran Amsterdammer known as Oscar. The man had a clear memory while Beno could vaguely remember the barbeque. Beno made up an excuse and asked the man to watch over the stroller as he walked past a FEBO snack wall, to a vending machine that served hot fried snacks, to the next one that served cold drinks. It was all a ruse to call Oscar, who had no idea who he was talking about until he mentioned the well groomed beard, “Aah!” He explained, “That’s Samora. His wife works at Google”.

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When Beno returned a few moments later, holding his bottle of water, he found Samora fixated on the stroller. It was the first thing he mentioned.

“I don’t think this is folded right” and without seeking permission, he deftly opened the stroller and then collapsed it in one smooth manoeuvre and reduced it to the size of a square gym bag. It was now conveniently portable.

“Chief!” Beno exclaimed, “You are a vet…” and he started to tell Samora about his three month old daughter and how his wife had insisted she wanted this Rolls Royce of a stroller and had been on his case about it for three weeks.

“Congratulations, your first?”

Beno nodded and asked if Samora had kids.

“Four kids”, He paused, “Two older girls. The twins after that, a boy and a girl… ten now…and my oldest just joined Delft university”.

This meeting seemed now serendipitous for Beno. The train delay, the unlikely trip to the north, the baby stroller, all conspiring towards this meeting with a veteran father. Finally someone he could pour out his anxieties to. He told Samora about how his wife is getting on his nerves about how he holds the baby wrong and puts on diapers backwards. He described how tired and sleep deprived he had become but he couldn’t speak up about it because he would be invalidated by the remark, “You think you know tired?”

After his rant, Beno turned to Samora and said with a tone reserved for a disciple seeking wisdom from a sensei,

“Any tips for a new father?”

Samora had been listening all along with his arms folded tightly across his chest gripping his biceps. He seemed to be blinking at double the normal rate and Beno found him surprisingly reluctant to volunteer any information. He was being vague.

“I don’t know, there is really no script” was all Samora offered but Beno persisted,

“Just tell me, did you ever feel like some second class parent? It takes me a good 30 minutes, rocking, swinging, proper aerobics to calm the child and my wife shows up, unleashes her boob and the child is quiet in under 30 seconds”.

Samora’s shoulders looked partially shrugged, making his neck look shorter and he had slight furrows between his brows.

“This is normal for men”.

“Okay brother, let me rephrase my question. Give it to me straight. Three things that you did well, three things looking back, that you would have done differently?”

Samora’s eyes had widened slightly and he was scanning the platform avoiding direct eye contact. There was an expression on his face, a grimace maybe but that vanished into a slightly pained look and he was licking his lips.

“I don’t know what to tell you.”

“Come on brother, you are the senior most. I can’t even think of life post diapers. Okay, just make it one” and faced Samora alert, waiting for a nugget.

“Just don’t forget yourself, man”

Beno reacted to that, “ Yeah, I wish, but the gym had to be sacrificed. Between the wife, the baby and work it’s serious juggling, I tell you”.

Samora’s voice had dropped an octave lower and his arms were still folded,

“I can imagine, just don’t forget yourself”, he replied.

Beno wasn’t relenting on his query and he felt Samora was holding back some hard truth that he thought he couldn’t handle and he tried to pursue a different angle.

“Let me ask a different question. How did fatherhood change you?”

Samora was locked on the schedule screen and that furrow between his eyes returned. It was the look of an antelope that had heard a stick snap. He was very still and quiet.

Beno thought, “Maybe he didn’t hear me?”

Samora seemed to want to say something but the words wouldn’t come out of his mouth. Beno was getting unsettled by his silence so he decided to change topics,

“By the way, how is the wife doing, is she still at Google?”

Samora unfolded one arm and was now stroking his beard and he cleared his throat once,

“Let’s just say, it’s not sunny at the ranch”

Samora had that tight polite social smile that is common among Western and Northern European cultures and it suddenly dawned on Beno where the restraint was coming from.

“Oh, shit man, I am sorry. I am so sorry. I didn’t know. What was I thinking, damn, sorry bro?”

Samora tapped his shoulder to calm him down,

“It is alright brother, shit happens”

Just then the ding of a notification lit up Samora’s phone in his hand. He looked at it fleetingly and then turned the screen face down against his thigh. He glanced once toward the far end of the platform into the darkness of the tunnel in the direction the Utrecht train would come from. He had the expression of a man calculating something that had nothing to do with trains. Then he turned back and his face had reset itself.

Beno now wished the train would appear but the time on the schedule board had disappeared, replaced by dashes. So the two black men stood together in a sea of whiteness, side by side like twins separated at birth.

It was Samora who spoke first,

“Can I have some water?”

“Of course!”

Beno quickly unscrewed the bottle top and handed it to Samora, who took it without looking at him. Beno turned to look the other way. His eyes rested on the Febo automated wall, the crispy deep fried snacks, perfectly lit, behind the little glass doors, promising comfort. This was cheap, unhealthy and lonely food and it occurred to him that this illusion of convenience only attracted those who had run out of options.

You may now purchase my book Strength and Sorrow HERE.

Strength and Sorrow by Oyunga Pala is now available for purchase on Amazon for the Kindle and Paperback HERE.

A row of three jacaranda trees came up on my left and I lowered the window to take in the purple splash. Nairobi felt pretty with cool air, blue skies above the canopy of mature trees in bloom. We were driving through some back roads that I wasn’t familiar with and as if reading my thoughts, Fadhe had some history to share.

“You know, before they built this monstrosity, this used to be a soccer field and the whole of this street was just single bungalows with mature jaracandas on both sides”.

I tried to imagine what he was talking about. All I could see now were high rise apartments and walls. His Nairobi story had open spaces for roaming. My Nairobi was constantly stuck in a traffic jam.

We were in a posh looking Toyota Land Cruiser Prado. It wasn’t ours. It was Uncle Bob’s. Fadhe’s buddy from college who had all the nice things. Fadhe argued that we needed space for the suitcases and, importantly, comfort. It was black on the outside and inside was roomy. The leather seats were shiny and they felt soft. Fadhe drove it like a hearse. He took an odd detour and they started arguing with Madhe again.

“Where are you taking us, I thought we were going to the airport?”

“We are taking the scenic route”.

“No, no, no, please use Google Maps, I don’t want us getting lost, you have already rushed me through my day, don’t make it any worse.”

“I am using Google Maps” Fadhe barked and he pointed to the dashboard screen at the blue cursor trailing a blue ribbon.

“Fadhe, are you avoiding highways and main roads?”, I asked from the back seat.

He nodded and kept driving. Madhe didn’t push back. She just whipped out her phone, and stopped talking.

We left for the airport 6 hours early. Fadhe did not want to use the Express Way. They got into a fight about it with Madhe. She wanted something quick and convenient. Fadhe wanted to be safe rather than sorry and true to character, he had factored in any eventuality. This was Nairobi after all, a city he was born in. The most predictable thing about this city was its unpredictability, and he was not taking any chances.

Madhe pushed back hard when Fadhe suggested that we leave the house at 2pm for an 8pm check-in and I saw my father capitulate in the face of the argument. He stopped talking and retreated into a shell. He looked exhausted in a way that wasn’t familiar. So I used my veto and said we leave at 2pm.

We took a turn that took us straight towards Kibera and I saw Madhe look up from her phone when suddenly we were stuck behind a matatu that had stopped to pick up passengers on the road.

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“Why are you going through Kibera, this place is always congested and dangerous?” She slipped her phone into her hand bag and removed it from her lap to the floor of the car.

Then warned me “Pumpkin! please bring up your window”. Madhe sat upright as Fadhe lowered his window, to speak to a man on a boda motorcycle and soon after that the matatu in front of us inched onto the pavement and allowed us space to pass. Every inch of the road was occupied. People walking, hawkers weaving between traffic, boda boda motorcycles on both sides and then we encountered a man with cows. The windows of the Prado were tinted so as Fadhe snaked through, I watched it all scroll past.

We drove right through Kibera, from the Kabarak gardens, past Fort Jesus, Olympic and Ayany estates and then we came upon a curtain of trees, the Ngong Forest and Fadhe was off again.

“I went camping here as a scout in primary school. And we had guard duty. Imagine you standing in the pitch dark outside a khaki tent with only an aluminium cased torch, a wooden staff and a whistle. It was the first time I had heard a hyrax at night. Do you know what a hyrax sounds like?

“No”. I said

“Ask me to tell you?”

“What does a hyrax sound like, dad?”

“Like someone being strangled”

I was glad Madhe spoke up because Fadhe had a dark sense of humour

“Can we not talk about such morbid topics today”.

We were now driving through the Karen suburbs. They were called leafy for a reason. Fadhe was navigating back roads with the familiarity of a taxi driver and he had some music on now that gave me road trip vibes. The sound system in this car was crisp. Rhumba had never sounded so melodious. Fadhe started tapping his fingers on the steering wheel and then imitating the lead guitar as Madhe turned her head between the front seats to run me through a check list,

“I packed a thick warm jacket…“

I protested in vain, “Madhe, I told you I got a thermal jacket, its heat tech”

“You don’t know winter, I have been to Estonia in February, you have to stay warm”.

Mathe had woken up early to cook chapatis. In the afternoon she roasted groundnuts. I tried to dissuade her with stories about strict border customs officials but she dismissed my concerns. The customs officials would have no problem with cooked stuff and anyway, I was not going to Australia.

Fadhe was lost in concert, singing along to Madilu System and Franco and then he burst out in his terrible imitation of a Congolese accent, emphasising every syllable for the people in the back,

“Madame et Madesolille, le presente Le Grand Maitre, Le Maestro. Franco Luambo Luanzo Makiadi et T.P.OK Jazz band presente Madilu System”

Those formerly dreary long ass songs that I had grown up with a background noise in the house came alive in my ears. I could hear instruments, all of them, an orchestra and the clear voices of two men in dialogue, talking to each other, in, with the beat, all of it woven into a story with multiple characters in my mind.

We dissolved into it, Madhe and I and if there was one thing we shared in common, it was our fascination, for the fascination, the likes of my father had with Congolese Rhumba. The car went quiet, the music dominating and we listened with rapt attention to Franco in dialogue with Madilu, even though none of us spoke Lingala.

Fadhe had a piece of history that he just couldn’t keep to himself , “Do you know how Kisumu got the nickname, Mboka?”

He was waiting for my response. “How did Kisumu become mboka, dad?”

“Have I told you this story…anyway, it was inspired by Franco. This was the 80s. He was calming down the crowd that brought down a wall in Moi stadium and stampeded his concert in Kisumu. He kept saying, Bana Mboka! Bana Mboka! calm down and then he unleashed the guitar on the people. The rest is history. After that night, Franco had a town in Kenya named after him”.

Madhe had something to say about this, “Your father has convinced himself that he understands Lingala but doesn’t speak it”.

I remember there was an obsessive season where one of Fadhe’s cousins kept sending him English translations of Lingala songs and I reminded him about that time.

“Your mother knows my cousin Atwech, who has never even been to the Busia border, let alone leaving the country but he speaks fluent Lingala just from studying Franco’s lyrics. Franco’s music is therapy”.

Madhe wasn’t letting up, “Do you even know the meaning of this song, all you just wait for is the part where it goes, “ Mamou, eeh! eeh! eeh!”

You cannot win a Rhumba argument with Fadhe and he retorted, “These days you don’t have to know any language fluently, you can use AI and you will be surprised by how well Franco could unpack society”.

The arrival at the JKIA airport gates ended the Franco debate and I looked at the life size animal sculptures at the round about, the rusty brown of the scarp metal strikingly beautiful against the blue sky. I took a picture for the gram and looked up the artist. Kioko Mwitiki.

The Prado had a special pass, so we got a convenient park slot and it wouldn’t be a long haul with suitcases to the baggage hall. We stopped at the first cafe we encountered because Madhe said it looked clean and she needed to use the bathroom but not before she was seated. The cafe’s terrace was packed, all tables taken but that did not deter Madhe. Fadhe had parked the trolley of suitcases at the entrance and looked resigned.

Madhe just stood at the entrance, and her commanding presence soon drew the attention of a polite elderly waiter with grey hair appearing holding a duster in his hand.

He addressed Madhe with deference, “Madam, come, I have a table for you” and we were led to one that was occupied. There were three men seated at the table and the grey haired waiter told them with a menacing tone to get up and when Madhe inquired about them, he replied with a polite smile, “No madam, they were just leaving.”

Madhe ordered chai and the evenly brown succulent mandazis visible from the glass display and then made an order for me as well as an afterthought, reminding me that I would “Miss ndaos like this in Europe”.

Fadhe ordered a beer and asked if I wanted one. Madhe thought it was completely inappropriate for him to suggest drinking before my flight and Fadhe shot back that I was not the pilot. The joke did not land well with Mathe. She looked stunned in disbelief and Fadhe buried his face on his phone.

I turned down the beer and asked Madhe to get me a cappuccino instead of chai. That is where me and Fadhe were alike. We didn’t lose sleep over tea.

A queue had started building up at the entrance to the boarding gates and Fadhe had to cancel his order for a second beer. Madhe asked him about ‘his cousin’ and Fadhe told them they would be picked from the cafe’. But that was 40 minutes ago and Madhe had a point, the queue had built up.

Just as we started moving the trolley, a large woman appeared and her face was already smiling before she reached us. She covered Fadhe’s stretched hand with both of hers in greeting. She had short hair and a round face, wearing a reflective jacket, a lanyard with a badge dangling, her entire face covered in a smile.

After she had finished apologising for keeping Madhe waiting, she fussed over me for a little bit and asked if I remembered her. Of course I had forgotten her name again but I knew who she was. She was who you called when you had trouble with customs at the airport. She was like Fadhe’s distant village cousin, the relation somewhere at the grandfather level but she asked it like a quiz question on our family tree.

People looked at us but I avoided eye contact as she led us right past the long line to the head of the queue. A younger official, also in a reflector jacket, was pushing the trolley ahead of us. Madhe walked upright behind her, I followed and Fadhe trailed. I hoped they assumed we were Business Class travelers with priority boarding. Madhe certainly looked business class.

My suitcases were loaded through the security scanner and we asked as family to go through metal scanners. I had seen people ahead getting tapped down but not us. By the time we had gotten back on our shoes and belts, Fadhe’s distant cousin had already found us a front spot on the Kenya Airways line to the ticket counter and a previously empty counter, had an eager attendant in a bright red blazer ready to serve.

When the suitcases were placed on the weighing scale, of course they were overweight. The weight was fine until Madhe said she was packing just a few more things. Those few things were actually two bulky winter jackets, a stack of chapatis, two packs of frozen Farmer Choice sausages wrapped in thick foil and a bag full of roasted groundnuts. I had enough stock to start a pop up restaurant in Amsterdam.

Fadhe’s cousin tried to persuade the ticket attendant to let it pass but she declined, regretting that the bosses were around. Madhe’s position was clear. She was not returning home with chapatis. We would have to pay for extra baggage. Madhe looked at Fadhe who stepped forward reluctantly to ask for the cost.

With the baggage rolling out of sight on the belt, Fadhe’s distant cousin walked us to the Immigration Check area and announced that we would not be allowed beyond this point and asked Fadhe if there was anything else we needed. I admired her confidence. She was a boss lady, walking us past queues, smiling as rope barriers were opened and we were given free passage, while all around us were frustrated faces waiting for their turn to be served. She was now saying goodbye and she returned her focus to me. This time her expression was all serious. She told me to study very hard and not to get lost.

“Your parents have sacrificed a lot for you to study in Europe”. And then she faded through the mob of travelers crowding the terminal in the same way she had emerged.

I had an usher on standby to take me through the VIP line, the one used by the pilots and the UN diplomats. There was hardly a queue on that row. We had time on our hands because a process that would take an hour, was wrapped up over the length of a Franco song.

We sat on a blue padded bench. I was between my parents. Fadhe had my back pack between his legs and Madhe had my jacket covering her knees. We sat, not talking, just people watching for a long time. Fadhe made a comment about many Chinese travelers and Madhe asked me to remove my boarding pass from my back pocket. But mostly we just sat, like a family at Uhuru park on Sunday after church, watching travelers lugging luggage across the hall.

Madhe reached first and clasped my hand and then shortly afterwards, I felt my Fadhe clasp my other hand. I did not want them to talk. I had never been this intimate with them in public.

The announcement for the opening of the boarding gates came through but we all pretended to ignore it. Fadhe looked at the flight schedule screen and told us, we still had a little more time, and none of them let go of my hands. After 10 minutes, the queue on the VIP lane was filled by an airline crew and Fadhe let go of my hand as I reached down to lift the backpack between his feet.

Madhe saw this and squeezed my hand, not letting go. I turned to face her and her eyes were wet.

“Madhe, do not start”, I warned her.

She flashed her hand in front of her face and then tears started trickling and then she was whimpering covering her eyes with her silk scarf. We leaned on to each other, I urged her not to cry because I would be triggered. People were looking at us. But she couldn’t hold it back so I wrapped my hand around her waist and I felt her pull me tightly into her bosom.

Fadhe sat upright, his eyes focused ahead as if we were just two strangers complicating his night. I thought he was unmoved before I noticed that he was holding my hand again and that his grip was firm.

After getting my passport stamped at the Immigration gate, I turned back to look and they were still there. Madhe waved with both hands and blew me kisses. Fadhe’s wave was brief and his lips were pressed together.

I texted them as soon as the plane started taxing. Fadhe reacted with claps and celebratory emojis and Madhe went gushy with love emojis, followed by a new checklist copied, that she had already sent to my email, with all the contacts and emergency contacts for when I land in Amsterdam.

Madhe had found a way to upgrade me to Economy Comfort and I had so much leg room. As I fiddled with the inflight entertainment, I noticed they had Franco under the African music genre. I remembered Mamou and really wondered why it had hit differently earlier. So I asked my Ai.

What is Mamou by Franco Makiadi about?

“Mamou” remains one of the most requested and discussed songs in Franco’s discography. Its popularity is attributed to its unflinching realism regarding the pressures of urban life in Kinshasa and the lengths individuals go to maintain social “masks” within the family unit.

I thought of Fadhe and then Madhe. What would hold them together now after all the sacrifice?

“Oh Mamou!”.

You may now purchase my book Strength and Sorrow HERE.

Strength and Sorrow by Oyunga Pala is now available for purchase on Amazon for the Kindle and Paperback HERE.

I am patient number 2288466 in isolation ward 5C. I can’t leave.

I have an infectious disease.

The airtight door has a small circular window that reminds me of the periscope of a submarine. There is a buffer zone between the door to my isolation room and the corridor. Above the door is a clock that shows how much time I have to wait before I am attended to. Time moves slowly when you stare at a clock.

I wait for the nurse to bring in my medication. I hear the air gush as the outer door is pulled open and then catch a glimpse of the nurse peeping as she puts on her N95 surgical mask and covers her hands in gloves. I wait to see who the new face will be. This is a university hospital. There is a constant rotation of nurses attending to my case. They are mostly young and self conscious, and approach me with the rehearsed script of a salesman making a routine call.

I wait to hear what language they will speak. It is often Dutch and I wait, listen to see if I can catch the words and follow the conversation. It is not what they say but what they do not say that I am interested in. I search for the unsaid by reading their body language. Is she avoiding my eyes?

That is what my sister said, when she was hospitalized with a terminal heart failure. She said there was something about the eyes of the caregivers. Watch their eyes, they rarely lie and she knew what she saw in those eyes. My sister made it out of hospital but the fatality still caught up with her. Those nurses knew something, they couldn’t voice.

I know how I felt when they admitted me into the isolation ward and I think about all those people who didn’t make it out of hospital. I know catching TB this time around is serious and this disease had stayed hidden in my body undetected for two months before it announced itself in a pool of blood that I coughed out of my worn body.

The hospital is treating the incident with caution and that is both assuring and confronting. The confronting thought is that hospitals do not always guarantee recovery. I can die and how does one behave when that is a possibility.

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I can pick out a new intern straight out of college doing the rounds, asking a series of questions and when I apologize and ask if she speaks English, she appears hurried and eager to end the conversation. I think about their self consciousness, worried about how they will sound as opposed to how I really feel, I mean really feel.

I notice it is different with the older nurses, especially the integrated immigrants, who are not afraid to talk about life and not just what they can do for the patient. They sound like people who have survived and found purpose in loss. But I still wonder if they have the training and skill to discuss my mortality. What would they do if I actually told them that I thought I might die yesterday? What would they do with that information? Isolate me further, get me scheduled for a psychological test or dismiss me as a nervous wreck?

The doctor.

When is he coming? The nurse tells me to wait. She is going to ask.

I have been here for a number of days and still haven’t seen a doctor. That bothers me. The assurance of my life is in the hands of a stranger I have yet to meet.

They still need more blood to test. She doesn’t know how long it will take. Maybe a couple of hours.

A new nurse walks in. She is black and distant.

I have come to take your blood, she repeats indifferently in English when I don’t respond to the initial instruction.

I hold out my right hand, and she taps firmly, looking for a vein. The needle breaks the surface of the skin and I watch the blood rush and fill the vial. It is going to be tested, a part of me, without me and someone sitting in a lab will decide what I need to get well. I think about how life leaves a body in a room like this, one vial at a time, clinically, like the clock counting down on a microwave oven and all the medics do is really to readjust the dial, stalling but unable to stop the process.

I wait for breakfast. I don’t enjoy it because my sense of taste has not returned.

I wait for the phone calls, for the messages, the visitors and their prayers.

Should l tell everyone? Maybe not, because I have to manage their anxieties and they are not used to seeing me in this position.

Maybe I should wait for the body to heal so then we can have a real conversation about life as opposed to a caged one where I have to play strong, so that my loved ones do not panic.

I wait for the sun to shine against the window so I can feel its warmth. There is a single window with a view of the red brick towers of the hospital block. Construction work is ongoing. I can see the tip of the cranes from my window and hear the sounds of drilling. There is a spot of green, a hedge in need of love, but you have to stand at the extreme end of the room to see it.

Early in the mornings, I hear little birds tweeting and crows cawing before the rhythm thud of heavy construction machinery takes over.

The cleaner comes, nervous eyes darting above the face mask, holding the disinfectant like a revolver by his side as he heads for the bathroom.

I wait to see if he will notice that the floor needs sweeping too but his stay is brief and all I see is his back and the crumpled black plastic bag as he blurts out a mumbled Alstublieft in response to my Dank u wel and the doors seal shut behind him.

The coughing hasn’t stopped. It is violent and draining. I cannot wait for the blood in my phlegm to disappear and for normal mucus to return. I cough constantly and spit into a cup with a lid. The lab wants more of my sputum for testing.

The system now classifies me as a diseased entity, whose foreign pathogens must be monitored as they constitute a risk to public health. My mere physical presence could be a danger to others. It is different when you think about the danger you pose to your own family.

I wait for my wife to come from home with some savoury food and news of the children. She brings rice and beans in a plastic container. She sets it on the bedside table and steps back two paces, adjusting her mask and though there is a hint of a smile in her eyes, I can sense her anxiety. When she leaves, I wait for the sunset, which I cannot see from my window, and for sleep to come and sweep away my worries.

I used to read about those goodbyes and how heavy they felt for the visitor. Because you could never tell if it would be your last. All those years, I was never hospitalized. This was the first and it was serious but to tell her that I am scared would only add on to the burden of her anxieties.

I had many important things to do before that Tuesday morning that landed me in hospital. I had a dentist’s appointment, an important speaking function, a scheduled concert to attend that all joined the wait list. But it is nothing compared to coming to terms that this is moment reveals. Waiting for death that arrives at inconvenient times and disrupts our best laid out plans.

l wonder when the doctor’s confirmation that I am well will come and when I will return home to the children. I cannot fully be with them because I have to be in isolation even at home for fourteen days until I am no longer a danger to my own family. But at least we will be in the same house for their presence matters in my healing process.

This morning, I coughed and there was no blood. Just mucus, ordinary and unremarkable. I showed the nurse. She nodded. That was all. So I held the cup for a long time after she left, turning it in the direction of the morning light, because it was the first good thing my body had given me in days.

I exhaled. No wheeze. No trace of cough waiting to be expelled. Just air leaving, as ordinary as the mucus in the cup. I had forgotten what silence in the chest felt like.

You may now purchase my book Strength and Sorrow HERE.

Strength and Sorrow by Oyunga Pala is now available for purchase on Amazon for the Kindle and Paperback HERE.